


Star Wars Episode IX: The Extinction Revolution

by ParacelsusCaspari



Series: Paracelsus Caspari's Star Wars [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, F/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Redeemed Ben Solo, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:20:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 22,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21905872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParacelsusCaspari/pseuds/ParacelsusCaspari
Summary: A reimagining of the Sequel Trilogy, continuing the story from the end of Episode VIII onwards.
Relationships: Finn/Rose Tico, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Paracelsus Caspari's Star Wars [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1577926
Comments: 1
Kudos: 46
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics





	1. Opening Crawl

**STAR WARS**

**EPISODE IX**

**THE EXTINCTION REVOLUTION**

SUPREME LEADER KYLO REN is a defeated man. Despite being cornered and out of options, the brave RESISTANCE had escaped the clutches of his evil FIRST ORDER yet again, thanks to the heroic exploits of the Last Jedi LUKE SKYWALKER, and his protégé REY.

Months pass and the insurgent group’s whereabouts are still unknown— until a surveillance probe detects a signal coming from a YT-1300F approaching the remote volcanic world of Nevarro, alerting the COUNCIL OF GENERALS.

GENERAL HUX sees this as an opportunity to defeat the rebel forces once and for all with another assault, and most of the council agrees. But the Supreme Leader, growing increasingly unstable, is weary of these constant cat-and-mouse games: he has a new plan, one that is capable of extinguishing the flame of rebellion in the galaxy for good….


	2. Connections

"As your will, it shall be done." The chorus of words met no response. Kylo Ren sat in the throne room of the recently repaired First Order star destroyer, _Equalizer_. A council meeting to determine the best course of action against the remnants of the Resistance was adjourned after he deemed another assault against them pointless. To that end, he summoned the seven Knights of Ren to the bridge, and gave them the plans to be enacted instead of an assault. "A movement toppled by its enemies can rise again. But one which crumbles from within? That is dead, forever," Ren had boldly declared. The masked figures disappeared at once, off to embark on their mission. The Generals remained, waiting to be dismissed as was protocol, but Ren simply remained in silence, lost in his own thoughts. Only a curt throat clear from Hux prompted their dismissal, and as quickly as the meeting had been called, they marched back to their posts, continuing to oversee the vast operation onboard the massive starship.

In the months since the Battle of Crait, morale had been low in the First Order to put it mildly. Boredom was rampant amongst the rank and file, and there was a sense of unease and apprehension that hung over the facility like a dark cloud. This was not unease stemming from alack of faith in the leadership of Kylo Ren; after all, they had been markedly successful recently. Planet after planet surrendered to First Order rule in such dramatic succession and alacrity as to make any notion of poor leadership unfounded. Starkiller Base may have been destroyed, but the Supreme Leader in his ruthless efficiency and aggressive expansion kept the reputation of the regime intact as one to be feared. But the war had entered a state of limbo, and the tension was palpable. The conquest gave the troopers a feeling not unlike the preseason fixtures of a new season: yes, these were victories, but against vastly inferior opposition and not worth celebrating. Their last real challenge was against a crew of Resistance fighters small enough to fit inside one Corellian freighter, and they failed catastrophically. They had not forgotten Crait. That same freighter had now been spotted close to Nevarro, but instead of heading out there to hit them where it hurts, they were told to await further orders: denied retribution they felt owed. Sentiments that never bode well for leaders.

Truth be told, Kylo Ren's head was not fully _with_ the First Order. For months, all he could think of was the Crait battle: he stood alone in the control room, as Rey looked back at him from the doors of that freighter. The very freighter whose whereabouts he now knows. He has not initiated another 'Force Connection' since then. He knows what it would mean for the Supreme Leader to be discovered in communication with the figurehead of the Resistance. Even with that knowledge, he cannot get her out of his mind. Rey, that woman, the woman who freed him from the machinations of Snoke, gave him drive, and purpose, and friendship, like no one else has. To whom he offered his hand... the thought of it eats at him to this day. How simple his life would be, if he were free of this nonsense. Resistance, First Order, Rebellion, Empire, Jedi, Sith, he cannot express how much he just doesn't care. What he would give to simply to travel the galaxy with that woman, forging their own path, free of the shackles of the past. He would spend hours a day lost in his thoughts this way, as he now sat in the blood red throne room, alone, in need of a friend now more than ever. Rey. If only he could see her again. If only. But if only is just that, and here and now, Kylo Ren has made his bed. So he must lie in it. There is work to be done, and it shall be done.

* * *

Rose looked out of the Millennium Falcon’s window at the next stop for the Resistance. The surface of Nevarro was harsh and desolate. Rumblings of volcanic activity were audible for miles, the charcoal gray surface only occasionally interrupted by canyons and crevasses that revealed the vast amounts of magma that lay just beneath the planet’s crust, and served to make the surface temperature far hotter than those on the lush planets that the Resistance was used to calling home. But recent events had forced a change of strategy. Yes, they had barely escaped Crait by the skin of their teeth, but it was hard to feel optimistic given the circumstances. They had spent the last six months following Poe’s lead hopping from planet to planet attempting to forge alliances with those who would have anti-imperialist sympathies. But everywhere they went the story was the same: "We don’t condone the First Order, but we have food on our tables and we live safely. Why would we risk this?" asked one Corsican farmer. They weren’t wrong.

Under the supervision of Kylo Ren, the regime had gone about securing the loyalty of various planets by offering a steady stream of food, money and planetary-level protection in exchange for the removal of First Order deployments and deferred conscription of all the able-bodied men into the First Order Reserve Corps, to be redeemed should any resurgent sympathies arise. They were to retain autonomy, but at the price of loyalty to the First Order. It was a cruel means of undermining the Resistance’s ability to rebuild: were the presence of rebels to be discovered, the stream of resources would be cut off and they would be stripped of their entire youth population: by enlistment or by execution. As a result of this, military activity became obsolete, as the planets the Resistance visited had no interest in war. And because of this, other voices in the Resistance, led by Finn and Rose, began to have more sway in the group’s plans. Rather than attempting to continue the endless wars by finding military allies, they advocated for a less conspicuous approach to building relationships: socioeconomic empowerment.

Motivated by the obscene amounts of injustice and inequality they witnessed on Canto Bight, Rose and Finn grew disillusioned with the effectiveness of formal industrial military conflict against Empire. They had seen firsthand what an informed and a motivated populace can do to a complacent ruling class, they now understood that military control comes and goes, but when an oppressed class of people rise and seize power from their subjugators, when the people are empowered, fascism cannot take hold. The Resistance began to prioritize insurgency that worked to depose unfair systems of power, and put wealth back in the hands of those who worked hard to create it. Not just shoot down TIE fighters for the sake of it. Their most recent success was on the mineral planet of Yrkanoc, where the regime-controlled mines that provided much of the First Order’s mineral reserves were taken over thanks to a guerrilla group of the locals led by Rose.

Because they were working on such a small scale and they always kept the deposed rulers under lock and key, the First Order was completely unaware of what had been happening; a glaring weakness in the system of Indirect Rule, had there been regime presence on those planets those insurrections may not have been possible, but the stars aligned in the best way for them, and they had taken advantage. Their numbers also grew, as a few people would leave their homes to join the Resistance because they believed in what they were doing. Sometimes just with the clothes on their backs, other times with entire ships of true believers. The Resistance was growing again. As Rose always said, that’s how they would win: _not fighting what they hate, but saving what they loved_. Rose smiled to herself at the thought, allowing her mind to daydream lost in the never-ending soot of the approaching planet: slowly but surely, the tide was turning.

Now they had set their sights on Nevarro, as they learned of the existence of a rare spice deposit that was controlled by a First Order apologist owner. As they disembarked from the rickety freighter, Rose, Finn and Poe took a moment and did the usual headcount: 558 crew, (including them,) 6 freighters, 2 repurposed Rebel-era X-Wings. They went about unloading the equipment from the ships, setting up a temporary base, as they had done so many times before now, one group already starting work on a peculiar, oddly shaped tent.

"Why’s it look like that?" asked a new recruit out loud, an Yrkan named Ameena. The Yrkans were a reptilian race, notable for their vertically slit pupils and scaly skin. Ameena’s was a dark purple which complimented her bright green eyes.

"That’s the General’s tent. We always set it up first for her, least we can do since she insists on coming with us all the time," answered Finn, sounding chipper.

"The General?"

"Leia Organa, she’s sort of like, the whole reason we’re here"

"Wow, I’d never heard of her before." Ameena and Finn now sat on two crates as they talked, having unloaded the ships.

"Leia’s been in this fight her whole life, but now she’s at the point where she can’t really offer much in the form of boots on the ground."

"She does what she can," a new voice joined them now, none other than Rose’s. She was never far from Finn these days.

"Doesn’t make her much of a general, then, does it," pondered Ameena.

"I think she’s preparing us to keep this fight up when she’s not here anymore…" Rose answered, now taking a seat on Finn’s crate beside him, locking hands instinctively. "She’s lost so much as of late, her husband, her brother, it’s kind of amazing she’s still going."

"Yeah…"

The group went quiet now, almost in reverence. Their solemn introspection was interrupted by Poe, who informed them that preparations were going smoothly. The arrival of Poe would typically have caused this seemingly low-ranking member of the Resistance to feel out of place and leave, but Rose, Finn, and especially Poe had stressed the equilateral nature of the Resistance movement: this wasn’t to be an army, where people followed orders, but instead a co-operative force, no one above the rest. It even reflected in the Resistance’s attire, gone were the uniform fatigues and imagery evocative of an air force. Now its members were more expressive, basically wearing whatever they wanted but signifying their membership through a simple sleeve band that bore the group’s insignia in red. Still, Ameena preferred to join her new comrades in setting up the other encampments, and so off she went, leaving the three alone by the Falcon.

* * *

The last person to leave the Falcon was Rey, now hours after the encampments had been set up. She was still wearing her signature dark grey outfit, but now had a red 'Resistance' sleeve band around her arm where the scar from the throne room skirmish was. Her dark brown hair was now even longer, but now in a full single braid for practicality when fighting. In the months that followed the Battle of Crait, Rey had taken a back seat to the leadership by example of first Poe, and later Finn and Rose. Unlike them, she was not nearly as confident of her place in all of this. Her relationship to the Resistance was complicated, She grew up on Jakku idolizing the Rebels from the stories of old, but now she understood that she was not just a bystander in someone else’s narrative. She has been blessed with incredible power, the same power that both the heroes and villains of days gone had used to achieve incredible feats that still live on as legend— that same power is in her now; and the thought of what to do with it, what to truly harness it in service of, maddens her.

She was able to save the Jedi texts from Ahch-To before she left, and, thanks to C-3PO's dutiful translations, has read them cover to cover multiple times trying to find the answers she seeks. Of course, she is a willing fighter for the Resistance; during missions, she is a talisman, the superstar of the Resistance whose natural talent and fighting capability is unrivaled. There is no task too big, no imperial stronghold too fortified to hold her back, and they all appreciate her efforts at Starkiller Base and on Crait… and yet, she still finds it difficult to connect to them meaningfully. Finn was her first friend, but his crush on her when they met, flattering but unreciprocated, coupled with his lie about being in the Resistance and quitting halfway through the journey made it hard for her to meaningfully open up to him again. She doesn’t know much about Poe, having just met him after Crait, and barely had his prolonged company because of all the responsibility he now had; likewise with Rose, whose connection to Finn and similarly elevated responsibility distanced both from her even more. Leia’s health, though no one would admit it to themselves, was deteriorating. She hadn’t much time left, and far be it from her to take up most of it. The only real connection she had… She didn’t allow herself to finish the thought.

For long stretches of time, all Rey thought about was Ben Solo. The man she abandoned the Last Jedi on Ahch-To to go and save, who she jettisoned herself onto a star destroyer to meet face-to-face, the man who killed his Supreme Leader and fought back to back to her against his royal guard, that man Ben Solo: who still hadn’t learned the lessons she’d learned when he offered his hand. She wanted to take it, she absolutely did, but doing so would have resigned this Resistance to a horrible demise, as out of place as she felt and still feels, she couldn’t in good conscience abandon them. But what about now? Their numbers grow by the week, news of their exploits travels fast and wherever they go, they are recognized and heralded as liberators of the oppressed. Can she leave now..? Rey struggled with these thoughts in isolation. She lived inside her head much of the time, only managing curt head nods and pleasantries when she was greeted. Rey needed someone to talk to, an actual friend.

As she stepped out of the Falcon, she saw that everyone was occupied with their usual carefree antics, enjoying what was essentially a night off: they were all so relaxed, except her. She knew that what she was about to do was, by all definitions, traitorous. She knows what everyone will say if they find out what her plans for that night are: that she can still initiate the 'Force Connections' with Ben Solo; in fact she had thought about doing so numerous times, but the risk of being discovered by someone, as Luke did on the island months ago, had dissuaded her. She still hadn’t told anyone in the Resistance about her relationship with Ben, and how could she? He is the Supreme Leader of the fascist regime they— herself included, are risking their lives every day to fight against, how could they understand? She doesn’t even fully understand it herself. But the fact remains: all she has is Ben. And so, into the cool, arid night she disappears, running, sprinting almost. When she found a nice secluded place away from all the prying eyes, she would see his face again for the first time in months, the thought of it; if she could actually see herself, she’d realize she was grinning.


	3. Senses

Not much is known about the Knights of Ren. They are a cultish group of Force users loyal to neither Jedi nor Sith, they wear all-black armor and hide their faces in helmets evocative of that which Kylo Ren once wore. They number seven in total, though only six actually participate in assignments. Each carries a unique weapon, but few have ever seen them used and lived to tell the tale. They do not speak, and their names are unknown to all except Supreme Leader Kylo Ren himself. The Knights of Ren are currently in a heavily modified TIE fighter that is outfitted with retroreflective panels that render it invisible to the naked eye: it just landed on Nevarro. They sat in silence, reflecting on their instructions, preparing for the coming storm. What they were about to do would change the course of history forever.

"Your mission is simple," Kylo Ren had began. "Go to Nevarro, and find the Millennium Falcon. General Organa won’t be far from it. Assume my identity using the repaired helmet from the Visor. Take care of any security but leave one witness. Before you do it, ask the witness how you knew where they were. A movement toppled by its enemies can rise again. But one which crumbles from within? That is dead, forever."

"As your will, it shall be done," they had said in unison 

As they disembarked from the cloaked TIE, one of the Knights produced the package they collected on the way there from the chimpanzee-like First Order engineer named for his chrome visor. Inside was the repaired helmet of Kylo Ren. As the Knight donned it, he produced something else from within his cloak. The unmistakable lightsaber belonging to the Supreme Leader himself. And with that, the pledge was complete. "Kylo Ren" stood among the Knights, and they made for the Resistance encampment.

* * *

Not for the first time, Rey stood alone in a cave seeking answers she may not be ready for. This cave was about 1 mile east of the Resistance camp, and she was completely alone inside. In each hand she held two misshapen objects: the fragments of the lightsaber that was bisected by her and Ben's dueling force pulls. She knew how to repair it, of course, but wasn’t sure that she wanted to.

This lightsaber reminded her of Luke Skywalker: a man she idolized in her youth, but whose impression was tainted once they met; General Organa’s brother turned out to be a bitter, spiteful, self-important hermit, and was revealed to be the reason for both Ben Solo’s corruption and Snoke’s ascension to the throne of the First Order, a revelation facilitated by the first ever successful Force Connection she shared with Ben; which Luke interrupted and halted. Enraged by Luke’s actions, both past and present, she attacked and defeated him in an intense duel, berated him for betraying his own nephew, and declared her mission to save Ben Solo before leaving him on that island alone in the rain to drown his shame.

Rey had obviously heard about what Luke did on Crait. She was busy helping the Resistance escape, but she was filled in by Poe on how he appeared before the assaulting regime force and bought time for them to escape. How heroic. It wasn’t that she hated him, but only she knew the full context behind his decision to show up on the salt-white crystalline planet where the Resistance had made its last stand: his defeat at the hands of Rey, and the lessons imparted on him by the reappearance of Yoda had led him to project himself before Ben Solo, not to "do battle" with the First Order, but to apologize to Ben for failing him as a teacher and as a father figure. Rey had very little respect for people who simply perpetuated the hero myth of the Skywalkers and the Jedi. Heroes won’t save us. We save ourselves. She wouldn’t forget that.

Not that any of it mattered now: Luke is dead, and she had his last worldly belongings in her hands, as she exhaled, closed her eyes and reached out indescribably, paradoxically, as though she was looking left and right at the same time, all her senses fully aware yet fully closed off, through the force, across the stars, to the private Supreme Leader’s quarters of the _Equalizer_ , where she had once asked him if he had a shirt to put on, where she now opened her eyes to see none other than that man sitting before her on a small black bed, within arm’s reach; Ben Solo, no longer alone. Ben smiled.

* * *

Ameena slept in a tent with four other female Resistance members. They were using full body zip-up sleeping bags, but Ameena preferred to sleep on the warm surface of the Nevarro plains; she was cold-blooded, after all, and didn’t have the luxury of internal thermoregulation that the milk-drinkers had. In addition to this, she, like many Yrkans in her family, possessed two heat-sensing pit organs between her eyes and her nostrils, on both sides of their head. All of this meant that, unquestionably, Ameena’s body was far more receptive to changes in ambient temperature than regular people. So it was no surprise when in the dead of the Nevarran night, she was suddenly awakened from her slumber by an unexpected rise in ambient temperature just outside her tent; a warm cluster of heat that drifted past, almost like six or seven people walking together. No normal person is capable of noticing this wide awake, let alone while fast asleep, but Ameena found herself not only awake but slightly worried; you could almost say she had a bad feeling about this.

She had been one of the last to go to sleep that night. The scheduled morning watch wasn’t for several hours. The sun wouldn’t rise on this planet for another six hours. So who could be awake right now? Of course, some people could decide to wake up early, but she couldn’t shake the feeling. She quickly arose and in no time she was in her typical outfit: a simple getup consisting of a white long sleeve with a red Resistance insignia on the front that was cropped so as to leave her bandaged midsection exposed, black pants and grey combat boots. Blaster in hand, she left the tent in the direction of the heat cluster.

It was immediately clear to Ameena upon leaving her tent that something wasn’t right. There was almost no natural light at night on Nevarro, but being Yrkan she could see pretty clearly in the dark. The problem was, she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. That 'heat cluster' was six cloaked figures, heading straight for the General’s tent, the General’s tent which she had just learned earlier that day was where the General of the Resistance, that General, was going to be staying, where she now lay asleep and vulnerable. The tent was close to the center of the camp, and she had never rued its conspicuous shape more than right now. She began to sprint, but what happened next seemed so surreal, so frightening, it was as if she was trapped in a nightmare and never awoke moments ago.

Muffled screams from within the tent, followed by a now-blinding flash of red light. As she arrived at the scene and carefully made her way inside, making sure to cling to the shadows, she bore witness to her very worst fears realized: Kylo Ren, the Supreme Leader of the First Order, stood here in the General’s tent. Her personal guard also stood, for a time, motionless, rigid, and far-too-unceremoniously relieved of possession of their heads, before dropping to the ground with a sharp thud. She couldn't see it, but she could smell and taste the copious amounts of blood that now stained both sides of the inner walls. Leia herself was now awake, sitting up on her bed, staring at her would-be assassins. Ameena now looked away, fighting back tears and covering her mouth, frozen in horror less than a few meters away, with full cognizance of what was about to take place. Kylo Ren now spoke, his voice modulated by the black mask he wore,

"I’m sorry it had to end this way."

"Before you do it," Leia responded solemnly, "Just do me one favor: please tell my son I’m sorry, and I love him very much."


	4. Fates

"Rey. REY." His words jolted her. She had been standing there, speechless, captivated by the sight of Ben Solo. She may have forgotten how long it had been since she saw him. She thought back to that day on Crait, the last time she looked into his eyes. She may have been prepared to see him again, but she might not have been ready.

"Ben…" she answered, trailing off, almost like she was restraining herself.

"Are you… alright? You’re just standing there. What’s wrong?" Ben asked this with an air of genuine concern, like he could see the unease in Rey’s face as she spoke. He now got up from the bed now, standing at eye level to her.

He found himself unable to taunt her for calling after months of silence; he had thought about it, what he would do if— when— he saw her again, what he would say, but as so often happened when they talked, it was as if, like it or not, the only sentiment he could express in her presence was sincere compassion. Any preconceived capacity for callousness evaporated at the sight of her, leaving only boundless empathy. Rey hadn’t admitted it to herself, but this was what had made talking to him so easy. She collected her thoughts,

"I just, I just need to talk to someone right now."

"And there’s no one in your precious Resistance to talk to?" Ben stepped forward now, his eyes betraying genuine curiosity.

"Of course there is. They just…"

"They don’t understand. They don’t come close to understanding what you’re going through. The struggle you’re dealing with. How could they? To them, you’re their perfect hero: the Savior of Crait that delivered them from evil. They can’t begin to relate to your dilemma." Ben’s words, spoken calmly and matter-of-fact, had the effect of lifting a colossal weight off her chest. She began to grip the objects in her hands more tightly now. Ben hadn’t noticed them.

"They’re all, they’re all so sure of their place in all this… and I’m still not."

  
"If you felt so isolated all this time, why didn’t—"

"I don’t know." Rey interrupted him, her face flushing now. She already knew what he was going to say: why didn’t she call him sooner. It was always going to be that way the longer she waited to talk. The harder it would be to justify the gap between calls. Ben surmised as much, and like always, cut straight to the point, stepping closer once more.

"Rey, you have to realize it now. Your heart isn’t with the Resistance: you go through the motions, but you’re not truly _there_. You think you owe it to them, but you are your own person. I thought you understood this."

"I do," Rey answered, but with a tone that hardly conveyed conviction.

"Yet you still hold on. You still haven’t let go. You hop around those Outer Rim planets with a ragtag group of would-be revolutionaries, blowing up factories and stealing cheap ore. Is that what you really want to do for the rest of your life? Living as a criminal? I offered you my hand, and with it, salvation. It’s not too late, Rey. You can still take it."

"I did want to take your hand," she answered, before adding: "Ben’s hand." She stared straight at him now, no longer timid or wary, but resolute in her words. She had tried to erase that moment from her memory, but him bringing it up brought all the long-suppressed emotions surging back. She continued, "I thought that’s who I was talking to. The second you ignited that saber and took out Snoke, I really thought you were back. I wanted nothing more than to leave that ship with you. But then Kylo took over again, Kylo in his supposed understanding," it was her turn to step forward now, "Kylo didn’t call off the order. Nooooo. He still held on to the same delusions of grandeur that have always doomed the dark side. He presumed himself a rightful ruler of a subjugated galaxy!" She was so angry now, she threw what she was holding in her right hand at Ben without thinking.

In an impressive display of reflexes, he caught and inspected it, realizing it was the severed half of Anakin’s lightsaber from that night in the throne room. "Delusions?" he asked incredulously, "Rey, the entire Resistance was on a handful of transport ships. It was over."

"Your mother was on those ships!" Rey snarled back, tears welling.

"My mother was on those ships," Ben echoed. Talking to Rey, he had allowed himself to leave the here and now, fully engross himself in her words, but the mention of Leia Organa brought him back, almost like a compass realigned. There was one more pin to knock down, one more flame to extinguish, and as if by some twist of fate, here was the only real protector of that flame standing before him. He almost smiled, "and where is my mother now?"

"You don’t deserve to see her. Not like you are now. She’s…" At that moment, mid-sentence, Rey felt like she’d taken a punch to her chest that knocked the wind out of her. She could barely see straight. She came to and opened her eyes to look at Ben, and he appeared similarly winded. The last time she felt like this was on Crait, right as… before she could even finish the thought, she realized she had to leave right then, but before she could 'end the call,' Ben said one last thing to her, holding out the severed lightsaber.

"I’ll give this back to you in person, if you meet me where it all began. It seems you have one last lesson to learn. I’ll teach you."

Remaining silent, Rey vanished, and Kylo Ren was alone in his room once more. He spoke, as if she could still hear him, "It’s done."

* * *

_vvvvvmmmm_.

Another flash of red reflected on all the tent walls, and then silence. General Leia Organa was dead, murdered by the Supreme Leader of the First Order. Ameena nearly threw up from the horror of what she had just experienced. She had still not moved from where she was, but truthfully there was not much she could hope to do.

She was outnumbered six to one, armed with just one blaster. She stood no chance in a fight, but maybe if she used stealth, picked them off one by one, maybe those were better odds. She had one shot, and rose up to take it; darting from behind a storage crate and taking aim at one of the figures stood around the bed, almost in reverence. The beam had barely left the barrel of the gun before she suddenly found herself short of breath and several feet in the air.

The laser she had fired from the blaster, a seemingly guaranteed headshot on Leia’s assailant, was still suspended in flight, little more than a few feet from his head.

He spoke again, voice still robotic and modulated, "How did we know you were here?"

That was the last thing she heard before she passed out.

* * *

Rey could only think of the worst as she raced back to the Resistance camp. The last time she felt the same uncanny feeling through the Force from moments earlier was on Crait, after Luke Skywalker had made his last stand against the First Order. She remembered having to comb through the Jedi texts she stole from Ahch-To to explain how Luke’s appearance was possible to her Resistance comrades: _Similfuturus_ , the Jedi Doppelgänger technique, allowed the user to harness the Force to create a short-lived duplicate of themselves, and external objects, and project it anywhere they wished. Such was the effort required to perform this act, that doing so almost always came at the cost of one’s life. Luke died to save the Resistance, and she knew exactly when it happened: and now she felt that same feeling, today of all days, when instead of remaining with the camp, she snuck off to talk to Ben. How stupid, how irresponsible, how selfish. As far as Rey knew, superhuman speed wasn’t one of the 'superpowers' training under a Jedi gave her, but she was faster than most people. In less than 3 minutes she was back.

When Rey had left, the atmosphere in the Resistance encampment was almost like that of a festival. There was an all-encompassing sense of tranquility and relaxation despite the loud and rowdy activities, like nothing could burst the collective rebel bubble. Not anymore. Now it felt like a funeral. What Rey had returned to was a tense, lifeless scene, like all of that energy had been sucked out while she was gone. No one said a word, the campfires were put out, and the air seemed thinner, the way it would feel if you were approaching the summit of a peak, finding it harder and harder to breathe. 

"They’ve been waiting for you, they’re in the tent" said Klaus, a mechanic, to Rey as she arrived at the scene. He didn’t need to specify which tent he meant, there was only one tent that mattered in this situation.

"What happened here?"

"…"

The lack of a response from Klaus and his unwillingness to look her in the eyes had told Rey all she needed to know. But only when she arrived in the tent did the reality of what had transpired began to set in. The scene was morbid. Blood stained the inner walls, and the General’s personal guard lay headless before her bed. What could only be the body of Leia Organa lay motionless on the bed, covered by a white sheet. And in the corner of the room stood Finn, Poe, and Rose, watching a medical team try to apply urgent care to a fourth Resistance member she didn’t know.

"Leia," she spoke, hoarsely, as if she had to scrape the words off the walls of her throat. She fell to her knees, unable to support herself any longer. The sound alerted the three of them in the corner to Rey's presence, and they immediately rushed over to her. They began to speak, but Rey couldn’t hear any of it. Rey was dissociating. Her mind, not one hour ago excited and gleeful at the thought of seeing Ben, was now home to only feelings of horror, shame and disgust. Leia was dead. And she had killed her.


	5. Revelations

The sun had now risen on Nevarro. All of the Resistance members had dutifully worked throughout the early hours of the morning to clean out the General’s tent, and give Leia’s personal guard a proper burial. What would be done with her body was yet to be decided, but for the time being an escape pod on one of their freighters was converted by Klaus into a cryostasis chamber where she could remain until the location of her final resting place could be determined.

Kaydel Ko Connix, the Resistance operations controller, was on the northern edge of the camp speaking to a large group of Resistance fighters, laying out the plans for the mission they were about to embark on; a mission that was planned for today and still had to go on, with or without Leia. While there was no longer a formal chain of command within the Resistance, there were still people who personally took responsibility for various important tasks such as logistics, communications technology and equipment. Kaydel had been close to Leia, and short of the Big Four was probably the most respected Resistance member. It was for that reason that Poe, Rose and Finn agreed to appoint her acting commander while they sought Ameena’s eyewitness testimony of the events leading up to Leia’s death.

The Resistance leaders had agreed to meet at the medical ship where Ameena was rushed after urgent care had been administered, to be monitored until she regained consciousness. Poe and Rose arrived first, and waited together by the landing gear of the hulking, pearl white frigate.

"I’m just glad they left her alive," Rose finally said, after a long silence. "I don’t think I could have taken losing someone so young… on her second day."

"Honestly, surviving stuff like that can be more traumatic," answered Finn.

"Why was she even there? I mean, did you see what happened to the poor guards?"

"We’ll find out soon enough, I guess." Finn noticed Poe arriving and offered a hug in greeting, which Poe gladly reciprocated.

"Honestly once all that stuff was taken care of, I just had to go back to sleep," said Poe. "I don’t think I’ve had a more stressful start to a day since we had to evacuate D’Qar."

"I hear that, I’m sure Rey did the same," added Rose, who saw Rey making her way towards them.

"Hey." Rey’s eyes were red and had visible circles, like she had been crying for hours.

"Rey, I’m so sorry this happened," Finn began, "I really thought we were on a roll too."

"I know… Is the raid on the deposit still on for today?" she wondered aloud, hoping last nights events hadn’t thrown the operation into disarray, another item she’d have to add to the list of things she blamed herself for.

"Yeah, Kaydel’s handling it. She said she trusts us to handle the messy investigation stuff and didn’t want the gang to lose focus," said Poe. "I think honestly, they might just need some bad guys to punch to take their minds off it."

Rey allowed herself a slight smirk.

Finn now moved closer to her, placing a hand on her shoulder, "Listen Rey, I know you might want to blame yourself for what’s happened but you can’t beat yourself up over this. Leia did all she could to prepare us for this day, and it’s bullshit it had to happen like this but it was gonna happen."

"Do you want to join the raid, though?" asked Rose, thinking Rey might have wanted to go when she brought it up.

"No, I mean, yeah, but I can’t let you all handle this alone."

"Thanks, Rey. But honestly we all kinda worry about you for the same reason. You just seem so isolated these days," Rose said, looking sad, "it makes us wonder if everything is okay."

"I’m honestly fine, guys, seriously. Thanks."

"Hey, don’t ever sweat it," Poe said with a smile.

Their impromptu group therapy session was interrupted by _whoosh_ of the hydraulic doors of the ship’s bay opening, and cargo ramp being lowered. Ameena made her way down, but froze halfway when she saw that the four figureheads of the Resistance were huddled by the ship’s landing gear, awaiting her arrival.

"Am I in trouble?" wondered Ameena out loud.

"No, we just have a few questions," Rose answered. "Let’s take a walk."

* * *

"I think I need to sit down too," said Finn, stumbling to into the seat to Rose’s left in the lounge of the Millennium Falcon, resting his head on his hands on the now well-worn monster chess board that centered the seating area.

"Alright Ameena, whenever you’re ready: tell us what you saw," said Rose calmly, ignoring his theatrics. Poe listened intently from a seat on the other side of the chess board, while Rey stood silently at the technical station, watching Ameena speak to them from across the room.

"Okay so," the Yrkan began, "it was at like 0200 when I woke up because a bunch of people walked past my tent, cause like, I can sense that stuff."

"You can sense people you can’t see?" asked Finn, eyes lighting up.

"No, well, kinda… I can tell when the temperature around me changes," Ameena answered, pointing with the sharpened claw on her index finger towards the ridged pits either side of her nose, "and I can, like, 'see' thermally even in the dark."

"…Cool," chorused Poe and Finn, shooting each other smiles.

"Please go on," Rose said, in a tone that sent a clear message of ' _stop interrupting_ ' to them.

"Right so obviously, it coulda just been a few of the guys up early but, like, I don’t wanna take any chances," continued Ameena, "I go outside and see six big burly dudes dressed in all black, seriously mean-looking, heading straight for the tent. I start running after them but they get in first and then I just see this big flash of red in the tent and, y’know…"

"The guards," declared Rose.

"Yeah," said Ameena solemnly, "I thought about finding one of you, to get help, y’know, but… it just felt like I had to be there. It was like my legs just moved on their own."

"I know the feeling," Finn added, the tone of his voice now more serious.

"So I go in, and freakin’ Kylo Ren, the same dude with the dumb helmet and red laser sword from all the First Order posters, he’s there in the tent surrounded by the other guys in black, also with helmets."

"Kylo Ren? Here?!" it was Rey’s turn to interrupt now; she had been listening intently but hearing that was like a slap to her face that prompted a gut reaction.

"Yup. I couldn’t watch cause I sorta knew what was about to happen, but I heard him, like, apologize to her," Ameena continued. "And she just went, super calm like she wasn’t even scared of this guy, she goes, 'please tell my son I’m sorry.'"

Rose, Finn and Poe were speechless. They couldn’t for the life of them imagine how Kylo Ren could have found his way here. Rey was lost in thought, hanging on the quote, _please tell my son._ Ameena went on, relieved to not be interrupted,

"And there’s just, so much silence; until…" Ameena made a sound meant to evoke the sound lightsabers make when ignited, but ended up being closer to a tap being turned on. "I only have a blaster, and I know I’m outnumbered, but I still feel like I have to do something so I pop up from behind the crater and take my shot."

"Ameena that’s so dangerous, you really should have went to get help," Finn said sternly, "you could’ve gotten killed."

"I know I should have but like, I dunno man, I just felt like I was there and I could do something so I had to. Isn’t that what you woulda done?"

"…" Finn’s silence betrayed his concession.

"So like this is the real crazy part," she continued, "he stops the blaster shot _in mid-air_ , and then he chokes me out at the same time without actually touching me!"

"Yeah, that sounds like him, alright," Poe wryly quipped, with a tone that conveyed a sense of familiarity to Ameena.

"And then get this, he asks me 'how did we know where you were?' Last thing I remember until you guys came in and found me this morning."

The group was stunned. Rey was the first to speak,

"Ameena, are you sure it was Kylo Ren you saw?"

"I don’t know anyone else who dresses like that," answered Ameena sardonically.

"I’m pretty sure there’s no one else it could be," Rose added, "but how could he have found us? We triple-checked for First Order satellites in this system, and this is a regime planet, they don’t have any standing forces here."

"It couldn’t have been Kylo Ren," declared Rey, stepping closer to the group now,

"How do you know?" Finn asked, wondering why Rey was so sure it wasn’t him.

"There’s a buried lead here, Finn," Poe interjected from across the table, "he asked her how they knew we were on Nevarro, and left her alive. Why? Why would they not just kill her?"

"I mean, the only way they could have known where we were is if someone here told them," said Ameena matter-of-factly.

"So there’s a spy," said Rose.

"And he wanted us to know."

"But what does he gain from telling us there’s a spy?"

"Maybe he’s betting us on tearing us apart from the inside by eroding our trust," pondered Poe.

"Wait," Finn now chimed in, "are we just gonna gloss over there being a spy? That seems like a pretty big deal."

"We’re not glossing it over, but unless we can verify it it’s not worth screaming it from the rooftops, it doesn’t help us, just gives him what he wants."

"Rey, why were you so sure it wasn’t Kylo Ren?" asked Rose, having not forgotten her earlier interruption. The rest of the group turned to look at her now too.

"Kylo Ren couldn’t have been on Nevarro last night because he was on the First Order flagship," answered Rey, with what the rest of the group doubtless considered a surprising amount of certainty.

"How can you say that for sure?"

Rey knew she couldn’t hide it from them anymore, and in a cruel twist of fate, there couldn’t have been a worse possible time to reveal this information. So she took a deep breath, stepped closer to the table to take a seat beside Finn, and calmly replied, "because I was there."

The room fell silent.


	6. Plans

There is a spice deposit located in the Nevarran settlement of Walvis. Until fairly recently that deposit had been communally owned, and the money it generated was used by the townsfolk to subsidize the imports, to everyone’s free use and benefit, of several useful resources otherwise inaccessible on an arid volcanic landscape like Nevarro. One day, a disgraced bounty hunter known as Big Chill staked claim to the deposit for himself, convincing a group of fellow Guild excommunicates to work under him for a share of the profits. Rather than sharing the revenue from the deposit equally amongst the community as had become tradition, Big Chill kept it for himself and his gang, effectively becoming the feudal lord of Walvis; charging a levy for anyone who wanted to retain any of the services they had been getting for free. Since there had been no prior need for the accumulation of wealth in this society, no one could afford to pay this levy; and as one can imagine, the price for being unable to pay this levy was indentured servitude to Big Chill, where payment was issued to them for work in the deposits. Productivity increased on the deposits and it was able to generate even more money than before, but most of it went into the pockets of Big Chill and his gang.

When the delegates from the First Order came to Nevarro, offering a steady stream of credits in exchange for proprietary ownership of the spice deposit and its produce, it was like music to Big Chill’s ears. All he had to do was make a monthly shipment of spice to a designated outpost, and not long after he would receive a large shipment of credits directly from the regime. Everything about his operation in Walvis would remain the same, only instead of selling spice to Republic traders, he would ship them exclusively to the First Order; his loyalty in exchange for protection in the form of surveillance probes stationed clandestinely in the planet’s orbit. This was what the First Order had done on many Outer Rim planets; undermining the Republic and preventing their alliance from growing, and it was fiendishly effective. In order not to expend resources and manpower stationing deployments on each of those planets, the First Order could devote a fraction of that potential cost to provide for those planets, and reap rewards orders of magnitudes higher in the form of both the tangible resources they offered and their intangible but equally valuable loyalty.

However, this system of indirect rule had one glaring weakness: it relied too heavily on the individual resource providers on that planet holding up their end of the bargain. Were the shipments to stop, there was essentially nothing the First Order could do short of spending time and money going out to those planets to either coerce their re-entry into the accord or redeem the deferred conscription of their able-bodied youth. But could they realistically do that over and over again on every single planet? In theory, yes, but it was admittedly not the best use of the First Order’s time. Especially considering the relative unimportance of the planets in question: these were sparsely populated worlds, with very little political capital. This was the key gambit of the Resistance’s new strategy: they would liberate as many Outer Rim planets as they could, and bank on the First Order not deeming them important enough to recapture; after all, if the regime truly had designs of ruling over the galaxy, their efforts were better spent maintaining control over the Core, Mid and Inner Rim planets that had pledged loyalty to them in fear after the Hosnian Cataclysm but since reverted to Republic alliance after news of Snoke’s death and the Battle of Crait spread through the galaxy.

It was entirely possible that the Republic had since begun rebuilding their naval fleet after its destruction in the aforementioned Cataclysm, but the goal of the Resistance was not to simply hand over control of these worlds to another military power in the Republic, but instead to the people themselves; a tantalizing prospect for most of the Outer Rim since, at least to them, Republic control and First Order control had looked the same. By prioritizing the specific empowerment of each planet’s people and avoiding the use of 'institutional' terms that were evocative of Republic and First Order influence, the Resistance had simultaneously given themselves realistic short-term victory conditions and earned the good will of the common folk on those planets, as a third way forward from the oppressive fascism of the First Order and the stagnant bureaucracy of the Republic. No one on the Resistance realized it yet, but their actions had sown the seeds of a movement that could see a lasting end to the power-imbalanced federations in the galaxy, and usher in a new age of self-determination and true planetary autonomy; with the common people at the forefront, as they should have been. This was in essence the true long-term goal of the Resistance.

For now, though, they couldn’t afford such lofty ambitions: the Resistance had but a singular focus: wresting control of the Walvis spice deposit away from Big Chill’s gang, and giving it back to the townsfolk who were indentured there. Despite the fact that their General had been murdered in cold blood just hours earlier, here they stood, waiting to storm this facility as they’d done before, some for the first time, others for the twentieth. Their dedication to the cause was steadfast, and because of how they were structured— which was to say, basically not at all— they didn’t actually need Leia Organa to be present for their operations to be successful: in fact, it had been rare for her to participate in these missions at all. As a result, the vast majority of the Resistance’s membership had little to no emotional connection to the now late Princess of Alderaan, a reality which made Kaydel Ko Connix’s job all the more simple as she went over the siege plans one more time with her squadron, from a hill facing the south side of the ash plains that embanked the settlement. At her signal, Big Chill’s gang would face the full might of her and her modest company of 150-odd combatants.

"Everybody got that?" bellowed Kaydel, into a vocal amplifier she held in her left arm, her right arm taut with a heavy blaster.

"Loud and clear, Kaydel!" was the chorus.

"On my signal," she began, before firing a flare shot high into the air, raining down a flurry of red sparks onto the unsuspecting guards at deposit’s gates. "For the Resistance!"

"For the Resistance!" they echoed, and charged across the plains.

* * *

"I’m sorry, what?" was the eventual response from Finn, his jaw still on the floor from Rey’s bombshell. Finn, Rose and Ameena were still confused.

"I used the Force to appear on his ship, but I was physically on Nevarro. I can’t very much explain it properly but he and I have been linked through the Force ever since I began training with Luke on Ahch-To. At first it was inadvertent but we eventually learned learned to control it."

"So it’s like a hologram transmission, except in person," said Rose, in bewilderment.

"Yes, basically. The last time it happened was on Crait right before we left, but… I did it again last night."

"You’re just now telling us you have a secret link to the Supreme Leader of the First Order?" Finn replied, jaw still very much on the floor.

"I’m sure she had her reasons, Finn, if I remember right the first time you met Rey you lied to her about being with the Resistance and waited a while to come clean too," snapped Rose, her words harsh but true.

"You’re right," Finn said, after a concessionary exhale, "I’m sorry Rey, I’m hardly one to judge."

"It’s alright Finn, I mean, it’s not that I didn’t want to tell you guys," Rey began, "I just…"

"She didn’t feel ready to, and when she was she would, right?" said Poe finally, completing her thought. "I think Rey still has unfinished Jedi magic business from that island, and she didn’t think we could help her with it," Poe added, his words conciliatory where Rey had feared admonition.

Rey was now overwhelmed with emotion. She had feared confessing to her friends because they might accuse her of false loyalties, but instead they met it with empathy and understanding, even admitting their own shortcomings as far as matters of 'Jedi magic' were concerned. She had been wrong to close them off. This was genuine friendship she had, and she nearly threw it away. Tears began to well up in her eyes again, but just as she did earlier, Ameena interrupted another tender moment,

"So if I’m gettin’ this right, the guy I saw in the tent wasn’t Kylo Ren because you," she began, pointing to Rey, "used Force magic to talk to him in his ship all the way in wherever-the-hell he is?"

"It seems so," Rose concluded.

"Ameena, is it?" said Rey, now composed. "Earlier you mentioned Leia said something to the man you saw, right as he drew his weapon on her."

"Yeah, she said 'please tell my son I’m sorry,' or something like that."

"Then that proves it couldn’t have been Kylo Ren: Kylo Ren’s real name is Ben Solo, the General was his mother," Rey noted.

"Holy shit," exclaimed Rose.

"How didn’t you know this?" teased Finn.

"It never came up!"

"So the guy in the tent was someone pretending to be Kylo," Poe declared, bringing them back on topic, "and Leia somehow knew?"

"Leia and Ben must have had a Force link just like Rey’s, and when she saw the man in the tent and didn’t feel anything, she knew it wasn’t him," surmised Finn.

"That still leaves the issue of how they knew where we were," added Rose, brows furrowed in thought.

"Rey," Ameena said, finally stepping closer to sit beside Poe, her legs sore from standing all this time. "You said when you started that, Force link, or whatever, you saw that Kylo Ren was on his ship, right?"

"Yes," replied Rey, "he was in his chambers, alone."

"What if he also saw where you were in the same way?"

"The first time it happened I remember him wondering aloud about how I was doing it, and if I could see his surroundings, he couldn’t see mine."

"Convenient."

"Then it wasn’t anyone in the Resistance that told him," concluded Poe.

"Maybe there was a surveillance probe that our scans didn’t catch?" Ameena suggested.

"Huh," was the nonplussed chorus from all four of them as they turned to look at her, her simple hypothesis just random but founded enough to make all the pieces fit together.

"So we arrive on Nevarro," said Rose, attempting to collect their conclusions, "and a probe picks us up, relays our position to the First Order. And instead of attacking us, they send someone dressed as Kylo Ren to kill Leia, and tell one of us that they found us because there was a spy."

"That’s some plan," quipped Ameena.

"So what now?" asked Poe.

"I don’t think they realize our recent, uhhh, strategy change," Finn said. "They might think we’re still like, an army and stuff. Trying to take out our General to send the troops in disarray."

"So do we just ignore this?" wondered Rose aloud.

"I think I’ve thought of a way to respond to the First Order and deal with my 'Jedi magic business' at the same time," Rey stated.

"Boom!" exclaimed Finn, shooting Poe a grin across the table.

"I knew she’d be back," Poe declared.

"Just what we needed," Rose said wryly, "another plan."


	7. Conversations

_bzzzzzz-bzzzzzz_

The sound came abruptly from a small device near the center of the Millennium Falcon chess board, catching the five people seated around it off-guard. It was Poe’s communicator, and the callsign digitally emanating from it matched that of Kaydel Ko Connix, who left about four hours ago to complete the raid on Walvis.

"That looks important, do I have to go?" asked Ameena.

"I think we’re past that point, kid," was the candid response from Poe. "You’ve seen and heard more than Kaydel and she’s probably gonna love that." He answered the call, and the entire table was met with the glitchy, monochrome cyan, holographic likeness of the acting Resistance commander; visibly dirtied by ash and blood, what was left of her usually tight buns now a messy web of gold blond hair that framed both sides of her face.

"Good to see you, Poe," she began.

"Lieutenant Connix, glad you made it. Walvis handled?"

"Yes sir, we spent more time getting back here than we did taking the damn place. Big Chill had gone soft, and some of his guys didn’t like him taking First Order credits. Was already on thin ice before we showed up."

"That’s my girl!"

"Is Leia handled?"

"Well… kinda sorta. Meet us at the Falcon once you’re ready, we’ll fill you in. And send our thanks to the guys, they made this happen."

"Will do, Chief."

And with a _kssssssh_ the transmission was over, the faces of the five no longer illuminated by its blue light. Poe stuffed the device back in his pocket and got up to leave, prompting Ameena to politely excuse him.

"Let’s put a pin in that plan of yours until Kaydel gets back, Rey, I need to go run the debrief with the guys real quick," said Poe, as he jogged off the freighter to meet with the returning battalion.

"I’m gonna go see if Chewie needs food. He never likes the ready-to-go stuff," Finn added, prompting a similarly awkward get-up-and-out-of-the-way routine from Rey that anyone who has sat at the edge of a booth and not been the first to leave will relate to.

Now it was just Rey, Ameena and Rose at the table, and Ameena, presumably tired from the _very_ long day she’d had so far decided now was a good time to take a nap.

* * *

"Rey," said Rose, breaking the silence, "are you really okay? Like _okay_ okay?"

"Honestly? I’ve been better," Rey replied, with a heavy exhale. This, hard as it was to believe, was the first one-on-one conversation she’d had with Rose she could remember, probably ever. "But I’ve basically been a mess since the whole Crait affair."

"Tell me about it."

"Well there was this whole thing with Ben, and his history with Luke, and them giving me different versions of what happened…" Rey trailed off as she noticed Rose holding back laughter. "Is there something on my face?"

"No, silly, 'tell me about it' is an expression, like, _I know the feeling_. But you took it literally and started explaining the story."

"Ah," said Rey, with a smile.

"Actually tell me about it though," Rose added, moving closer to Rey now, her eyes locked to hers in attention. "I want to know."

Rose’s words were met with the biggest smile she’d seen from Rey since she met her.

"Well when the Resistance sent me to Luke, I followed the map to Ahch-To where I found him on the island," she began, relaxing in her seat. "He was honestly a bit of a dick."

They both laughed, before Rey continued.

"I had this idea that I was just going to go there, give the lightsaber to Luke, and he’d come back like everything was new and fix all our problems."

"But it’s never that simple, is it."

"Yeah, turned out, while the rest of us had built him up as this legendary Jedi who would come back one day to save us, he’d realized the Jedi themselves were the problem."

"But the Jedi are the good guys, right?"

"Well… it’s not that they’re not good it’s more that at the height of their power they made mistakes that history has been kind to. We let them off the hook. Like Luke put it, they’re deified and idolized but their legacy is failure."

"These days, people don’t really see the Jedi as anything, do they? Not everyone even believes in them. Honestly, even when Finn told me about you lifting the rocks on Crait, I didn’t believe it."

"Really?"

"Seriously! Deep down I didn’t believe any of that stuff was legit until we landed on Nal Katta and I saw you jump like thirty feet in the air to bring down that First Order signal tower."

"Okay it was only fifteen feet, first of all," said Rey, through a giggle.

"Still!"

"So you thought the Force was a load of rubbish?"

"Kinda? On Hays Minor the Jedi were always kinda like, a myth, y’know? Stories they tell kids at night, and you’re never sure if it really happened."

"Same on Jakku. I never thought Luke Skywalker was actually real."

"At least you got to meet him," sulked Rose.

"Ehhh you’re not missing much," Rey replied, to more laughs from them both. Rey couldn’t remember a time where she’d smiled this much.

"So you think you can be a better Jedi than Luke?"

"Honestly that’s sort of my problem," answered Rey. "I don’t know if I _want_ to be a Jedi anymore."

"Whoa," Rose said, sitting up now from the position she’d taken: her head resting on her crossed arms on the table. "You’re not turning evil on us are you?"

"Of course not," she stated with a smirk. "I just mean I don’t know if I want to walk the same path the ones before me walked, or if I want to carve out… something new."

"If you ask me, all the Jedi I’ve ever heard of sound like a bunch of cranky old dudes," said Rose, to a snorty laugh from Rey, "and you don’t look like an old dude. If you wanna start something new, consider me your first disciple."

"Consider it considered."

"So I’m guessing the reason you could only talk to Ky– Ben Solo, about this stuff is 'cause he feels the same way, but with the…" Rose trailed off as she searched her mind for the counterpart to the Jedi she’d learned about but since forgotten.

"…Sith?"

"Yeah, those guys. Does Ben feel just as conflicted about the Sith?"

"He does," Rey said solemnly. "His grandfather, Luke and Leia’s dad, was Darth Vader."

"…who?"

"Really? Darth Vader? Big scary bloke, black armor, black cape, black helmet?"

"Not ringing any bells."

"Well he was a big time dark side guy, the Emperor’s right hand man, before Luke managed to turn him back the light and defeat the Emperor together. Snoke, he figured he could be the new and improved Emperor, and fancied Ben as his new and improved Vader."

"This is one messed up family," said Rose, thoroughly absorbed in the story.

"Tell me about it," Rey responded, with a smile. "Snoke seduced Ben to the dark side while he was training with Luke, and succeeded because Luke tried to kill him after he sen—"

"Tried to _KILL_ his own nephew?" exclaimed Rose, making sure to emphasize the verb in that sentence.

"Now you see why I can’t be asked with these people," Rey joked, before continuing, "he tried to kill him after he 'sensed the dark side' in him. Only Ben wasn’t fully turned, and his rash decision made him join Team Snoke."

"Damn."

"So after he joined, he was still quite conflicted about the whole evil Sith thing; when I got captured by the First Order and taken to Starkiller, Han Solo— Ben’s dad— and Finn came with Chewie to bust me out and blow the base up. But it turns out Leia had told him to try to bring Ben back."

"Oh no."

"Yeah, he came face to face with Ben, and Ben thought that killing his dad would settle the conflict in his heart…"

"But it just made it worse?"

"Always does. By the time the connections between us started, I could tell he was more torn apart than ever. I didn’t quite get it at first, I had him pegged as this, fully evil guy. But the more I found out the more I realized he was just a boy who’d been manipulated. He wanted a friend, and he was a friend to me; he helped me… deal… with some issues I’d had, in his own way. And I’d resolved to do the same for him. But when Luke found out we’d been talking, he didn’t take it too well."

"Is that why you left the island?"

"Yeah, I had a big fight with him, told him off for betraying Ben, and left him there in the rain."

"You kicked his butt."

"I did," Rey echoed, chuckling. "I left the island with Chewie and went to the First Order ship, turns out right as the escape to Crait was happening."

"No way," said Rose, nearly squealing. "I was on the ship at the same time!"

"What?"

"Yeah! Me and Finn had gone to Canto Bight to find a codebreaker who could disable the device they were using to track us through light speed. But we got double crossed and captured."

"I’m assuming you survived?" quipped Rey.

"That’s funny. What happened when you got on the ship?"

"Well Ben took me to Snoke’s throne room, where he threatened me for a good while, but Ben betrayed him at the last second, and we fought off his imperial guard together until we were the last ones standing."

"That sounds really romantic," teased Rose. "No wonder you’ve been running off late at night to talk to him."

"Shush!" Rey retorted, playfully slapping Rose on the shoulder.

"So lemme guess, right as you two were about to fly off into the stars, the ship was torn in half?"

"Not quite, but basically. I told him to call off the chase but he was still thinking like a Sith. I tried to take back the lightsaber he’d gotten hold of during the fight, but he held on, until it split in two right as the ship did. The blast knocked us both out, but I woke up first and escaped," Rey finished, as she brandished the piece of the lightsaber to show Rose.

"That’s so cool," she said in amazement. "Where’s the other half?"

"…it’s with Ben."

"That sounds _really_ romantic."

Rey didn’t bother answering, rolling her eyes while trying not to blush instead.

"So you think there’s still a chance you can get Ben to turn good? That’s your big plan, right?"

"You’ll just have to wait until they get back to hear it," replied Rey, with a content smile.

* * *

The two women found it very easy to talk, eventually moving on from their recent history to other topics— as well as physically moving on to the cockpit of the Falcon, so their girl talk wouldn’t wake the now fast asleep Ameena up— bonding over their shared love of tinkering and mechanics, their harsh upbringings on remote, arid planets, and even just the experience of being a girl in traditionally 'boy' spaces, and when they circled back to the topic of boys, Rey saw her opportunity to strike.

"So, you and Finn," she began, as Rose immediately buried her head in her arms to hide her blush. Rey pressed on, with a devilish smile, "what’s going on there?"

" _Ughhhhhhhhh_ I dunno," Rose answered, raising her head to look up to the heavens as she sighed, "he’s just, y’know, so brave, and bold, and heroic."

"I guess he is."

"Ironic, because the first time I met him, he was trying to desert the Resistance ship."

"Shut up," Rey said in bewilderment. She’d never heard _this_ story.

"He was, said he was trying to find you."

"That sounds like something he’d say."

"Yeah, he was honestly a little obsessed with you then, I was kinda jealous."

"When we met on Jakku, he had a super obvious crush on me that I sadly didn’t reciprocate."

"Hell, if I was a stormtrooper escapee and the first I thing I saw after crashing on a foreign planet was you…"

"Oh stop it," teased Rey, hiding a blush.

"But I guess our time together on Canto Bight kinda made him grow on me," Rose said, trailing off as if she were reminiscing on their hare-brained escapades through the casino city.

"And you on him," added Rey, "you should have seen how he took care of you after we left Crait. Heard you’d crashed your speeder into his to stop him from flying headfirst into a miniature Death Star."

"Yeah, that’s more or less what happened."

Rey leaned across the cockpit to the co-pilot seat to Rose, whispering. "That’s really romantic."

Rose, face beet red now, pushed Rey away as both laughed.

The girls would have to put a pin in their conversation, as the _whoosh_ of the hydraulic doors on the Falcon was followed by three sets of footsteps, and very loud, very boisterous bantering between two of them. They returned to the lounge to see that Poe and Finn were back, and were joined by Kaydel, face freshly cleaned and buns restored to their natural tightness, wearing an earthy green long sleeve with brown gloves, brown pants and tan combat boots, completing the outfit with a lighter green flak jacket emblazoned with the red Resistance logo. It was time to decide on the Resistance’s next destination.


	8. Schemes

General Armitage Hux stood alone in his chambers on the _Equalizer_ , lost in thought as he stared into the great expanse of the Mid Rim. All he wanted was to see the galaxy under First Order rule. It was his singular focus. Hux sought nothing less than the total subjugation of the known and unknown regions. Time and time again, however, this agenda had been undermined by the machinations of those who were above him in the chain of command, yet appeared to have different priorities. First, the implosion of Starkiller Base. A weapon of mass destruction on a planetary scale was destroyed thanks in no small part to Kylo Ren’s obsession with Luke Skywalker, an obsession goaded and enabled by Snoke.

Despite this setback, they had the location of the Resistance’s base. All they needed to do was attack, and the war would be won. Yet again, Snoke failed to see the bigger picture, choosing instead to set his sights on a scavenger girl, a disciple of Skywalker’s crackpot religion; a decision which ended up costing him his life. Worst of all, despite all of that, they still had the very last of the Resistance cornered in one cave on one planet. And instead of vanquishing them once and for all, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren once again lost sight of the goal, allowing the phantasm of Luke Skywalker to goad him into a pointless battle while their true enemy escaped.

Hux had often thought back to that fateful day of the Battle of Crait; when he saw Kylo Ren unconscious on the floor of the throne room, and the Supreme Leader’s bisected remains before that throne. He had brandished his blaster and considered putting an end to Ren, he who only existed to derail his visions for the galaxy, but moved to do so a moment too late. Ren arose, claiming that the girl had bested Snoke and himself in combat, killing the former, and now was headed to rendezvous with the Resistance.

But did Hux really believe that? Did this scavenger really defeat the full might of the Praetorian Guard, Snoke, _and_ Kylo Ren by herself? It certainly beggared belief. In truth, Hux often questioned where Ren’s loyalties truly lied; for his actions were not consistent with someone who shared a similar vision for the galaxy. And now here they idly sat, aware of the Resistance's location, but expected to do nothing. Because the Supreme Leader apparently had a better plan. No more, Hux concluded, as he exited the dark walls of his chambers. No longer would he allow the childish obsessions of this man to jeopardize his vision for this regime and this galaxy.

Hux made his way to the main hangar of the star destroyer, where a small regiment of three death troopers had been waiting, dressed head to toe in glossy black armor; a stark contrast to those of the other rank and file stormtroopers that patrolled the hangar.

"General," was the chorus from the squadron, amid robotic salutes upon his entrance.

"I have an assignment for you."

"Sir," one death trooper began, "we were instructed to remain at ease until arrival in the Kastolar system."

"Yes, _they_ ," replied Hux, waving his left arm across towards the vast hangar behind him, "are to remain at ease. _You_ ," he continued, pointing at them now, "have an assignment."

"Understood sir."

"When last we saw the Resistance, their numbers were small enough to fit inside a light Corellian freighter. They can’t have grown by that much in the time that’s followed. We now know the location of said freighter: the planet of Nevarro. You and your platoon will go to Nevarro and eliminate the rebel scum."

"Yes sir," they again chorused, before turning to board the Atmospheric Assault Lander parked nearby; already manned with two squads of troopers and cleared for takeoff.

Hux stood to watch as they departed the bay, engulfed in thought as he prepared for the next item on his agenda: the Supreme Leader.

* * *

"Wow," was the laconic response of Kaydel Ko Connix upon being brought up to speed by Poe Dameron, Finn & Ameena, and Rose Tico & Rey on both the findings of their collective investigation into Leia Organa’s murder and the intricacies of Rey’s Force Connection with Kylo Ren, respectively. She stood before the group as Ameena had done before; the diminutive Yrkan now changed into a black long sleeve of her typical style, nestled at the technical station where Rey sat earlier.

"That’s as far as we’ve gotten," said Poe from the table, flanked on either side by Finn, and the pair of Rose and Rey. "But Rey says she has a way to respond to them and deal with her unfinished Jedi business while still helping us."

"I have to say, before I hear what this plan is," Kaydel began, "I wouldn’t completely rule out an attack from the First Order— even if it’s not happened yet. They know where we are and that scares the crap outta me. I’d suggest leaving as soon as possible."

"That’s why we’re here," replied Rose. "Ideally we can start packing up right now, maybe leaving a ship and a crew behind to watch over Walvis for a little, if that’s okay."

"I’ll let 'em know."

"So," Finn said, "what’s the plan, Rey?"

"I’m going to get Ben Solo to betray the First Order," she said matter-of-factly. "He told me to meet him when I was ready for one last lesson 'where it all began.' I think I know where he meant."

"That sounds…" Rose said, before being cut off by Rey.

"Romantic?" she asked, with an eye roll.

"…like a trap," was the serious response, met with an exasperated sigh and a raise of the arms in protest from Rey.

"Rose, we can touch each other through those connections: if he meant to harm me he’s had numerous opportunities, most of all when I showed up alone in his room."

"So you think you can get Kylo to bring down the First Order from the inside?" asked Poe.

"I’m sure of it. If I can get to him he will turn."

"So what are we gonna be doing while you rescue your boyfriend?" Ameena wondered aloud from the edge of the room, finally speaking.

"I… haven’t thought that far ahead," answered Rey, knowingly or unknowingly ignoring the boyfriend remark to much amusement from the group.

"I think we should consider splitting up," Kaydel said, knowing better than to laugh at their most powerful member. "We’re large enough now where we can cover far more territory simultaneously working in parallel groups."

"Also makes it harder for the First Order to track if we’re two places at once," added Finn. "I like that plan."

"Great," Poe concluded. "Kaydel and I can take one group, with Finn and Rose running point on the other."

"Can I stay with Rey?" asked Ameena, half-joking. "Her part sounds more fun."

"No, you’re sticking with me," Rose replied.

"Boom, I get to see your thermal powers up close," added Finn.

"Perfect," Ameena said, deadpan.

"Kaydel, how soon can we be outta here?" asked Poe, pulling up a star chart on the chessboard console.

"We only got four new crew members from Walvis so it might take a little bit to get them the tech they need," Kaydel replied. "I sent the message to start packing up once Rose gave me the okay."

"Who’s got dibs on the Falcon?" asked Finn, not joking at all.

"Well it’s technically Chewie’s ship, and he can’t go with Rey so I guess whoever’s group he’s on," Poe replied.

"Dibs on Chewie."

"Damnit."

"I guess we relax till we’re packed up and let 'em know where each group is headed," declared Finn, leaning back in his seat, hands behind his head.

_bzzzzzz-bzzzzzzzz_

At that moment they were interrupted by the familiar buzzing of a communicator, this time Kaydel’s, who answered and was met with the face of a Resistance pilot from the communications tent, the pirate princess Wilsa Teshlo.

"Kaydel," she exclaimed, "First Order transport, picked up by scanners. ETA fifteen minutes,"

"Shit," was the chorus from the group.

"So much for relaxing," Ameena joked, equipping her blaster.

"Not a word from you," snapped Poe.


	9. Pulses

The fact that the Resistance had downscaled from a massive military organization to what was essentially a space pirate fleet did not also mean they had undergone a similar technological regression. They were outfitted with all the same weaponry, and still maintained a dedicated R&D group that geared their efforts towards communications and sabotage equipment. Klaus, along with several other technologically gifted Resistance members, had developed numerous gadgets and tools that could be used in a variety of ways to help the cause, and today they found themselves in urgent need of one them. A First Order transport ship had been detected by an orbital scanner of their design, giving them ample time to prepare a countermeasure for its imminent arrival. Klaus had the perfect solution, and with help from the others he hastily began the necessary preparations for its setup and use.

When the gang disembarked the Falcon, at the behest of Kaydel the five of them made their way to the western edge of the camp where, as she’d been informed by Wilsa, most of the Resistance crew members were assembled; huddled around a very large, ungainly piece of equipment.

"Uhhhhh…" Ameena blurted out, looking nervously around the busy crowd as they arrived on the scene. "What are they doing, exactly? Shouldn’t we be, y’know, running away?"

"Too late to run away," answered Wilsa, taking off her helmet to reveal straightened, auburn hair and two ridged horns, of the same deep red hue as her skin; typical of all Kessurians. "That thing is Klaus’ ion torpedo, and they plan to use it on the transport when it arrives."

"…" Ameena found herself momentarily zoned out, utterly transfixed at the sight of Wilsa.

"You okay?"

"Yeah," answered Ameena quickly, snapping back to reality. "It was just, uh, I’d never heard of it before," she fibbed, not having heard a word the impossibly attractive alien standing before her had said.

"Ion torpedo, decommissioned Rebel technology," Wilsa explained. "Resistance engineers been researching it and a bunch of other banned projects."

"Banned? Why?"

"Too dangerous, it can send out an EMP in a 100-foot radius, fries all electronics, good guy or bad."

"We just _have_ something that powerful and don’t lead with it every time?"

"You gonna pay for all this?" replied Wilsa, motioning to the essential technology they used everyday that was put in intense jeopardy whenever this device was used. "First time we used it was the regime relay station on Jaboor about two months before we got to your planet: and we’ve only just fixed the last of the affected tech from _that_ mess…"

"…and now we have to use it again."

"Hopefully with better aim and further away," added a third voice from behind them; none other than Rose Tico, former Resistance mechanic and de facto Resistance technology head honcho, flanked by Poe, Finn and Rey as they emerged from a tent closeby. "You don’t wanna know how long it takes to salvage EMP’d gear."

"We just finished sorting out our next stops, we’ll sort it out once we’re done with, uh, this mess," clarified Finn, looking around at the sea of people that now surrounded them.

"Seems like a lot of people have heard of it," noted Rey.

"It’s pretty cool," Poe replied.

"I wouldn’t know," she bemoaned.

"Yeah, you were only 40 feet in the air taking down that tower," he answered sarcastically.

"… _fifteen_ ," she mumbled.

Their banter was interrupted by the familiar howl of First Order ion engines in the distance, cutting through the air of ease like a proton laser. Things had been going good for the Resistance, but occasions like these were a stark reminder that the odds were still firmly against them: it was life or death, and at any moment the latter could come for any or all of them. A light hearted and relaxed environment had been crucial to stave off the existential dread, but they certainly never grew complacent. Everyone except the main crew working on the torpedo retreated to a fair distance away, watching events unfold relatively safely behind barriers constructed from the same modular materials the now since disassembled tents were made of.

"Primed and ready, Klaus," bellowed one engineer positioned at the foot of the hulking machine, its rigid and angular bodice only ever interrupted by the smooth chamber of the cannon, connected to the rest of the chassis via several securely fastened bolts. It gave the impression of a unique device made by someone with precise knowledge and with the tools available; not something assembled in a factory to exact specifications. The ridges of the cannon began to purr, as bright white energy began to emanate from its bodice, letting fly the occasional spark.

"Hold…" was the command of Klaus, a fist raised to signal to everyone that it was in their interest to keep their distance.

At that moment the First Order AAL peered into view in the gray Nevarran sky, barreling towards the Resistance installation, and prompting an engineer to aim the cannon, using a simple lever, and await the command from Klaus:

"FIRE."

Another engineer positioned behind the cannon immediately connected two fuses together and covered his ears, as did the rest of the Resistance members. Ameena, Wilsa, Rey, Finn, Poe and Rose were together behind a barrier just to the left of where the machine was.

"I’ve never actually gotten to see it before," Rey said, almost to herself; her eyes glittering with palpable awe.

"Same here," was the response from Ameena, readying her blaster almost instinctively.

"You’re not gonna need that," noted Wilsa, seeing Ameena holding out the weapon.

"Oh," she answered, the realization of what was about to happen setting in. "I just got this too…" Her deadpanning was cut short when the ion torpedo let out a hellish howl;

_EEEEEEEEEEEEE—_

_BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—_

_SCHZZZZZZMMMMMMMMMMMMVVVVVVVVVMMMMMM_

  
Piercing and unrelenting, almost tangible in a way sounds can only be when they are capable of damage to internal organs; before giving way to what could only be described as an impossibly loud explosion for its size. Contained to an area the size of a typical R2 unit, yet its shockwave powerful enough to cause the Resistance members of unsure footing to stagger to the ground, the sheer force of the blast sufficient to make the more hastily constructed barriers question the limits of their structural integrity: preceding a sound that was so indescribable that it was as if they had witnessed something enter lightspeed right before them: precisely what had happened. The kaiber protons isolated by the torpedo’s internal reactor from the crystals deposited in its chamber; incited by the external electromagnetic coiling into colliding one another until they built up so much electromagnetic and kinetic energy that it couldn’t all be contained without being converted to sound, light and heat, until critical mass was attained and the chamber of the cannon immediately accelerated the contents of the reactor to lightspeed, jettisoning them straight up into the silent Nevarran atmosphere on a collision course for the approaching First Order transport: almost pitifully unaware of its imminent fate.

_ZZZZZRRRRRRAKKKKKKK_

Less than a thousandth of a second after the torpedo fired, before anyone in the Resistance could even open their eyes to turn to the sky, the Atmospheric Assault Lander that had been approaching the base was met with the full unabated force of the ion torpedo’s payload; its control electronics were rendered completely useless. It was in freefall, heading straight for a barren stretch of ash plains about a mile northwest of the encampment. When the Resistance’s senses were restored to their full functionality after the assault from the ion torpedo, they would have been able to see the very last moments the First Order had been airborne.

* * *

"If you can still breathe, come out with your hands up," was the call from outside the doors of the AAL wreckage. Poe stood, blaster in hand and aimed at the door, flanked by the group he had helped up from their feet and made his way to the site of the crash with after the ion torpedo discharge; about half of the Resistance not far behind them— the rest having stayed behind to disassemble the torpedo and begin work on restoring communications and other crucial technology. "Final warning," he continued, with his blaster aimed at the doors, as the rest of them duly mimicked.

The door burst open.

A battalion of stormtroopers slowly trickled out to meet them. Their white armor was visibly damaged from the crash, and their size culled as well: they numbered only 84 out of the 200 that arrived in the ship. Only one death trooper was amongst them, the first to speak.

"The Resistance," the voice began, no longer modulated by the now useless component in their helmet, just an octave high enough that coupled with the build of the armor it was unmistakably recognizable as that of a woman. "I was told you were small enough to fit in a light freighter."

"That’s old news, lady," yelled Finn from behind Poe. "There’s a lot more of us now. It’s over for you."

"What did you do to our ship?"

"Why don’t you take that thing off and surrender, we’ll tell you all about it," replied Finn.

She wasn’t going to argue: she understood the odds. She silently stepped forward, before dropping the blaster rifle in her hand. The rest of the stormtroopers followed suit and took to their knees, expecting to be cuffed.

"Oh, we don’t do that here," was the response to that gesture from Poe, who tucked his blaster back into its holster fully aware that it amounted to nothing more than a paperweight for at least the next hour, but the prestige was now complete: the stormtroopers bought what they were selling, and they lived to fight another day.

Right at that moment, the death trooper disengaged her helmet’s manual lock, and took it off to reveal a head of very curly brown hair, only a few shades darker than her skin.

"I’m JN-3844," she said calmly, her brown eyes piercing a hole in Poe’s.

"Holy shit," said Finn.


	10. Allegiances

"FN-2187," the now unmasked death trooper said calmly. "I know you who you are. You’re the stormtrooper who deserted us after Jakku. You freed a prisoner, stole a TIE fighter with him and escaped the ship. You gave us all a lot of headaches."

"That’s not my name," he calmly replied, stretching out his hands in a show of passivity. "I did what I had to do, and now you can too."

"Don’t mistake my surrender for treason, scum," she snapped. "I will never betray the First Order."

"Is that so?" Ameena said from behind Poe, walking forward now. "What do you think the First Order will do to you if they find out we captured you, huh?"

"…" the lack of an immediate response prompted Ameena to keep talking.

"You think they’ll just welcome you back on that ship, pat you on the back and say better luck next time? Get real."

"What my friend here," Finn continued, "is trying to say, is that they sent you out here expecting you to finish the job on us and they’ll accept nothing less than that, which obviously isn’t happening. So you can do the right thing and join us, or we can leave you stranded on this volcano with no way off."

"No one is gonna come back for you, Jannah," Ameena added, drawing a glance from everyone in attendance, which she noticed. "What? Were you seriously planning on calling her JN-whatever?"

They remained silent in apparent accordance with Ameena’s assessment, turning back to face the death trooper.

"There you have it, Jannah," said Rose, stepping forward to offer her hand. "Your call."

The stormtroopers behind her remained silent. They had been conditioned to surrender themselves completely to the wills of their platoon commanders. JN-3844 was the sole proprietor of their affairs; she led, they followed. Her word was law, and that law had served them well thus far. This particular platoon had been markedly successful in their raison d’être: special response missions to remote planets. It was why Hux had asked them to do this, after all. Their previous experience involved quelling insurrections in the mining planets soon after the First Order began taking direct control of them in the weeks following their formation. They received praise from General Hux for their efficiency and ruthlessness, in dealing with those uprisings: most of all JN-3844, whose proficiency quickly allowed her rise through the ranks to become a death trooper in charge of her own squad.

She knew firsthand the standards to which officers of the First Order were held. Were news of her failure here to reach the First Order; which it soon would, given the fact that the AALs are fitted with transponders whose failure is only possible with a crash, there would be no use trying to go back: her fate, and the fate of her squad would be execution. But here she stood in the presence of her enemies, those enemies she had once ruthlessly exterminated, offering her and the squad she is sworn to protect, a chance at salvation, a chance to do the right thing and join their ranks; free of judgment, free of scorn. If she wanted to live, if she wanted them to live, she had to decide now. She cast the helmet in her hand to the ground, tossing it beside the still useless rifle, and raised her hand to meet Rose’s, still outstretched.

"I don’t hate it," she said.

"Hate what?" asked Rose, with a smile.

"Jannah," she answered, turning to face Ameena. "I don’t hate the name."

* * *

When they returned to meet the rest of the Resistance at the now mostly disassembled encampment, they brought them up to speed with events and began working on rehabilitating the stormtroopers. They now had 80 more additions to their ranks, and while it wasn’t an issue logistically, they couldn’t afford to be seen in the company of a whole squad of stormtroopers. Led by Finn, they provided them with basic clothes and supplies, along with new names; as well as going back to the crash site to salvage what they could from the wreckage and give the fallen stormtroopers a proper burial. While an inevitable consequence of war, Finn had always hated of killing: he avoided it whenever possible, and, with assistance from Rey and Rose, instilled that same mentality in the Resistance’s members. In all of the missions they undertook since their change of tactics, they incapacitated the opposition they faced in non-lethal fashion, and were enemy death was unavoidable, he asked that it be treated with the same weight and respect as that of allies.

This mercy extended most importantly to stormtroopers, who were all less fortunate versions of him, still stuck in the conditioning of their childhood, soulless pawns for a machine bigger than them. The thought of breaking all of them free from this conditioning had occurred to him more than once, admittedly, but the prospect of a stormtrooper rebellion was certainly far more large scale than an operation like theirs could handle: until the unexpected addition of several high level stormtroopers was thrown into the mix. Suddenly, it wasn’t so unreasonable a goal. After they were done with the wreckage and the burials, Finn made his way back to the encampment. It was finally time to decide where the Resistance would head to next, now that their business on Nevarro was truly concluded. He entered one of the few remaining tents and made his way to the front of the room of gathered crew members, standing shoulder to shoulder with Poe, Rose, Kaydel and Jannah, now with her hair in a tight braid, and wearing a new outfit consisting of her black death trooper boots, light brown pants and a black long-sleeve, with glossy black protective pieces of her old armor fastened to her shoulders and knees.

"So the plan is still to split up into teams, but now Jannah will be joining Team Rose," Kaydel began. "Jannah has information on what the First Order’s specific plans are so hopefully knowing that will help some of us take on a more focused point of opposition while the rest of us keep up the good work liberating these Outer Rim planets."

"Thanks," said Jannah, clearing her throat before speaking, still not fully used to speaking to people in plain sight and no voice modulation. "The First Order is currently headed to the Kastolar system. I’m not currently sure what their objective is for going there, but I know the Republic has begun rebuilding its fleet and most of the Core Worlds region is still loyal to them, until they take control of that part of the galaxy, they won’t have full control— Resistance or no Resistance."

"So do we go straight to them?" asked one crew member from the back of the room.

"I don’t think we can do much against an entire star destroyer and its fleet," Jannah answered.

"It also won’t tell us what they’re planning," added Finn, "which is arguably more useful information for us."

"I think I know where we can find someone who does," Rose said. "If we go back to Canto Bight, we might be able to find one of the First Order’s benefactors. Then we get them to tell us what they know."

"So we’re kidnapping people now," Poe quipped.

"I don’t like it either but we’re big enough now to take a gamble like this and not lose any momentum on the ground thanks to you and Kay," she replied.

"Speaking of that," Kaydel added, "we might want to think about shutting down another First Order relay station. The less of this territory they have covered with surveillance the easier travel will be for us and our allies."

"Good idea, where’s the closest one to here?" asked Poe.

"On Baleena, the ocean planet. It seems like they set it up on an artificial buoyancy biome a while ago when they built the network but we don’t know how well-manned it’s been since Starkiller went down. There’s no solid land on the planet so it’ll have to be a hover op. We’d need people to stay in the air on the ship while we rappel down and take it down."

"Will you guys be okay without Rey?" Rose wondered aloud.

"Don’t worry, we’re hardly shorthanded," answered Kaydel, motioning to the newly recruited stormtrooper squad that the Resistance could now call allies. They gave curt nods, still not having mustered the courage to speak directly to who they erroneously perceived as a higher ranking official. "The boys in blue have got our backs," she added, referring to the dark blue jackets and shirts each of them now wore, having discarded their white armor for lighter clothes given to them by the crew that were more emblematic of the rebel scum that they had now become.

"What’s Rey gonna do?" asked another Resistance member.

"She’s gonna be on a mission of her own," Rose replied, smiling. "Classified."

After they left the meeting to begin final preparations to leave on their separate missions having been split into their teams, Ameena realized she had left her backpack at her tent, and still had not been back there since she left to investigate Leia’s assailants almost 2 days ago now. She made her way to a clearing on the eastern edge of camp where cargo from the various housing tents was now being loaded onto the freighters headed for Baleena, hoping to find her bag amongst the others’ belongings. A quick scan of the busy area allowed her to see it on one of the trolleys, a vivid, colorful mass of green and yellow patterns, woven from an uncommon fabric native to her home planet into the shape of a typical messenger bag, a parting gift from her mother before she left home. She made a bee-line for it, only to absentmindedly run into Wilsa— who she’d very unforgettably met just before the ion discharge, now helping the crew load the crates onto their transports.

"Oops! Sorry about that," Ameena said as she helped Wilsa up to her feet, paying the flutter in her chest no mind as she took notice of the height difference between them, Wilsa being almost six inches taller at 5’10’’.

"Nice to see you again," replied Wilsa, easing the awkwardness of the accident with a laugh.

"Same here," was the excited reply, before her smile slowly disappeared as she realized what it meant for Wilsa to be here right now. "Looks like you’re headed to Baleena, have fun on those waves," she joked, not realizing how audibly disappointed she still sounded, something Wilsa clearly noticed.

"You’re going with Rose, right?"

"Yeah. I just came here to get my stuff," she said, pointing to the bag. "It’s all I left home with."

"Then so am I," Wilsa said with a smirk, as she turned to pick it up and hold it out to her

"But…"Ameena struggled to articulate now, her heart basically jumping up and down in her chest.

"I won’t tell if you don’t," said Wilsa, dropping the bag in Ameena’s hands.


	11. Motives

"Ben."

Ben Solo was caught off-guard, hunched over something.

"This isn’t the best time for this," he said, not needing to look back to verify who was speaking.

"Well that’s never stopped you before," was her snide reply.

"I guess not."

"I’m ready now, for the final lesson."

"Hm."

Ben stood up without saying anything more and continued walking forward, stepping past the figure on the ground he had been crouched above. Rey followed him silently, taking note of what she’d just seen Ben do, as she tried to make sense of her surroundings. They were in a temperate deciduous woodland, surrounded by a sea of towering hardwood trees devoid of any foliage. The air was cold, but not wintry, and the ground was a deep vermilion, as though the soil itself was mercury sulfide.

_thwackkkkk_

She had brandished her quarterstaff and struck a nearby tree, causing it to splinter into a thousand tiny fragments, confirming her inquisition into whether or not she was tangibly in Ben’s presence during these calls. The logistics of how she could physically move around and affect this space puzzled her— after all, _she_ was still very much on Nevarro. Once the Resistance dealt with the would-be stormtrooper invasion, she informed Rose that it was time for her to set her plan in motion. Gathering her belongings in the small brown messenger bag now draped over her shoulder after receiving her blessing and a quick sendoff from the others, she made her way out of the camp and to the same cave,now visible in the evening light as a vast system of caverns, from which she had first reinitiated their Force Connection. Now she had done so again, fully intending to take him up on his offer to meet 'where it all began.' She found herself able to move around and affect _his_ location, but what still remained unclear was whether or not she could be seen by other people, and whether or not she was moving around and affecting _her_ location.

Tabling her curiosities, she kept close behind him as the pair made their way deeper into the woods; their steps leaving stronger impressions in the black soot that lined the forest floor. Finally, Rey broke the silence.

"Leia is dead."

"I know."

"Why did you have her killed?" asked Rey, far more calmly than she had when she faced him for the first time on Ahch-To with this same question about his father.

"I’m sure you’ve already figured it out."

"Your plan failed, we know there’s no spy."

"Did it?"

"I don’t understand."

"Rey, both of us know the only thing keeping you with the Resistance was my mother. You refused to let go, because she still lived. You claimed to understand all of it. The lessons. But you still hold on."

"That’s preposterous! I don’t—"

"You hold on because you think Leia can give your life the meaning you crave; you think so little of yourself, Rey."

"Oh my— we are not doing this right now."

"'The belonging you seek is ahead.' That’s what you’ve been told. I saw it. And It’s true. I needed you to understand that, Rey."

"So you killed your own mother… to teach me a lesson?"

"I know the path I have to follow, and she has no place in it. You know it too. I needed to remove everything tethering you to the past, so you could finally start looking ahead."

"But she was—"

"She was nothing, Rey." he said, more coldly than she’d ever remembered him speak to her. "You barely even knew her. _I_ barely knew her."

"But you’re her son…"

"That’s what _she_ needed to hear. I know you grew up without your parents and you resent me for having two who you think… _loved_ me. But where was that love when I needed it? I was just a boy, and they sent me off to a temple to be a Jedi while they got to do what _they_ wanted."

"Ben…"

"You know what I wanted?" he said, finally turning around to reveal the tears welling in his eyes, which had been hidden from Rey’s view as they walked and talked. He found himself unable to finish the thought, wiping his tears and turning back around to continue walking. "You grew up without parents, Rey, and you know what? You’re not missing much."

Rey found herself unable to respond to Ben’s words. Harsh as they were, she had no right to dispute them, especially not given the evident pain and trauma they betrayed, and she knew better than to presume to know his own mother better than he did. She took the change in scenery noticeable as they ascended further into the forest, where a light drizzle now encompassed, as a cue to change topic.

"What is this place?"

"Vermenti. Mostly uninhabited Mid Rim forest planet."

"Why are you here? Who was that man on the ground when I arrived here?"

"That thing, was a Sith cultist; and I came here to complete the rest of my mission. The Jedi are gone, and now I’ll exterminate what’s left of the Sith."

"Is Vermenti where you meant when you said 'where it all began?'"

"No… It’s not here, I just didn’t think you’d show yourself again right now. This really isn’t the best time."

"Whatever it is you have to do here, why do it alone? Shouldn’t your _First Order_ , be helping you?" Rey replied, ensuring to voice those two words as nasally and as highfalutinly as possible. "Isn’t that how you do things? With noise and explosions and stormtroopers and TIE fighters? I’m sure if a temple needs blowing up they’d be able to handle it."

Ben once again turned back to stare at her, truly bewildered over how flippantly she spoke to him. He wouldn’t admit it to himself, but he found it incredibly charming.

"In the first place, I’m not alone here," he stated. "And what we’ve come to do can’t be done by those untrained in the force."

"Let me guess, you came here with the other weird men in black cloaks that you had impersonate you."

"Rey! Behind you!"

Just then, another cloaked figure appeared behind Rey; brandishing a lightsaber and lunging at her to strike. In a move almost too quick for humans eyes to follow, she pivoted on her right leg and delivered a furious roundhouse kick with her left to the hooded figure’s head: thrusting them face first into a nearby tree trunk, knocking them out instantly. Moving closer to the body, she removed their cloak to reveal a hideous, malformed face: pale as death and shriveled to the bone, as though all the life had literally been sucked out of it.

"Ben… what is this place?" she asked with genuine horror.

"More of them are coming. You can’t do much over the connection, I need you here."

"I’m stuck on Nevarro with no way off, Ben."

"You had no way off Jakku and you figured _that_ out," he said, as he ignited his infamous red lightsaber, its cross-guards flaring up only a second later. "The answers you seek are right here. We’ll go where it all began once we’re finished here."

_fvvvvoooooommmmm— MMMMMPH_

With a flourish of the saber he dispatched another figure to his right, before force pushing a group of three more that appeared in the trees to his left nearly ten feet away.

"I’ll be fine, Rey, just go!" he bellowed before charging into the trees. "Meet me at the top of this mountain."

Rey gave a curt nod, before closing her eyes and vanishing; opening them to find herself much deeper in the Nevarran cave than she remembered. 'I guess I was moving here too,' she thought aloud.

* * *

By the time she returned to the camp site a few minutes later, it had been stripped clean— save for a matte black Rebel-era X-Wing; one of two the Resistance had heavily modified for stealth, speed and long-distance travel by removing its weapon systems and replacing them with ion hyperdrives. Sprinting to it, she found a note on the fuselage, penned by Rose.

_We won’t need this we’re going._

_Have fun on your date!_

_— R_

Rey smiled to herself and suppressed a giggle as she read it before stuffing it into her bag, throwing it into the cockpit and climbing aboard. With the click of a button on the console, the droid in stasis behind her awoke from its sleep.

"01001-00111001!" it exclaimed.

"Nice to meet you too, T4-FI," she said cordially. "I’m Rey."

"0110-010101-01011101?"

"Vermenti. Can you take me there?"

"0011-1110010111!"

With that, Rey fired up the engines and gently pulled back on the control wheel, disengaging the landing gear and prompting the vertical thrusters to engage and hover. A light step on the pedal was all it took for the ship to zoom up and away into the cool Nevarran night. Next stop, Vermenti.


	12. Leaps of Faith

"Wow," was the breathless remark from Rey as she took a moment to gawk at the colossal ocean that made up just over half of Vermenti’s surface, it’s pristine, nearly fabric-like silver shimmer only occasionally interrupted by the swirling black clouds that painted the skies of the planet.

"Run a scan for mountainous terrain and cross reference with moving heat signatures, T4."

"0010101-0010110."

Rey waited silently for the droid to locate the peak she last saw Ben on, her excitement palpable. She couldn’t quite describe it, but finally being off on her own completing this… whatever this Ben thing was, gave her genuine glee. She appreciated her time with the Resistance, but if she had been given the choice between doing that and doing this, it was no secret where her heart truly lay.

"000101101010-1010110101-1101011," buzzed through her helmet, interrupting her silent daydream. T4 had found them, as the blinking red dot on her nav console now showed. One press of the pedal and roar of the engines later they were off, heading straight for the peak where Ben was last seen. As they approached, Rey began unbuckling her seat belt.

"00010101-1010110-10110101?"

"I’ll be fine, T4. Just keep her airborne and wait for my signal," she replied, dislodging a communications beacon from the dashboard of the cockpit. "See you in a minute."

The frigid nighttime Vermenti air rushed into the X-Wing cockpit as Rey raised the roof, perching herself on her seat as she stuffed the severed half of Anakin’s lightsaber into her pouch with the beacon, and draped her staff over her shoulder.

"0010110101-10110110100?!"

"Of course I’ve done this before," she snapped back, before leaping out of the jet.

As she freefell through the atmosphere, her mind raced. The furious whipping of the wind, her hair, her clothes, it was exhilarating. Flailing at first, she eventually steadied herself in a spread-eagle position that allowed her slight control over her descent. She hadn’t yet figured out how she was going to land without breaking into a million pieces, but she knew she didn’t want to endanger the Resistance by having a ship of theirs come into contact with the First Order, however indirectly. As she dove closer to the surface she closed her eyes and concentrated, tuning out all of the noise until she could hear exactly what she was looking for: the resonance of clashing lightsabers.

The unmistakable racket of furious fighting grew louder in the woods to her left; adjusting her course, she finally was able to see a clearing where several figures in black stood out faintly against the light grey soil, illuminated by the bright red flurries of lightsaber blades. Since the pitch black sky hid her arrival well, she needn’t worry about being spotted; only the landing. Picking a spot right in the middle of the bodies, she closed her eyes and reached out to Ben through their Force link,

"I’m coming!" she screamed, now only a few hundred feet away from the ground.

"Where? I don’t hear any ships!" Ben answered, as he dispatched one of the Siths he was engaged with.

"Up! Brace yourself!"

Rey stretched out her hands and thought back to that day on Crait, the first time she ever lifted rocks. As she calmed herself and exhaled, channeling her connection to the world around almost indescribably in the same way she had then, she felt her palms start to tingle, taut with pure energy as they cut through the air, bringing her descent closer to a sudden stop, or so she thought. Ben Solo, heeding her words, dealt with another loyalist briskly before stabbing his saber into the ground and crouching behind it; looking up into the boundless night sky unsure of what Rey could have meant by 'up,' before suddenly catching a glimpse of her as she came to within a few meters of the ground of the clearing.

At that moment Rey released from her palms a massive wave of force that manifested itself to the unwitting combatants on the ground as a concussive blast of sizable proportions that sent them flying, and to her as a bulwark that halted her descent by diverting the potential energy she’d built up in her freefall away from her, converting it to the aforementioned wave of kinetic force; allowing her to safely drop to the ground unharmed, and much more gently than the laws of physics suggested she should have given the height she fell from.

"Rey?" Ben called out, getting up from behind his lightsaber, the red light from it the only thing illuminating the pitch black expanse of forest.

"I’m okay," she said, panting on one knee, taking a moment to catch her breath and survey her surroundings, particularly the cloaked bodies strewn across the ground in varying degrees of disarray. "You couldn’t handle all of that?"

"What did you do?" asked Ben, ignoring Rey’s sarcastic remark and walking closer to help her up to her feet.

"I try not to think too much about the details. Where are your fancy knights?"

"Further ahead, I was ambushed here," he replied, taking a second to wipe his face with his sleeve.

"Takes some doing to work up a sweat in this weather," Rey answered, picking up one of the lightsabers on the ground, its former owner long since incapacitated. "I take it you’ve been at this for a while?"

"Yes, but there’s still more of them deeper in. How did you get here?"

"Let’s worry about that later. Further up yes?" she asked, beginning to make her way up the slope.

"By all means"—he gestured in that direction—"lead the way.

* * *

"I never apologized," Rey said, breaking the cold, dark silence as they made their way up the woodland mountain in together— their trek lit and scored only by the deep red glow and occasional crackle of their two lightsabers. "For bringing up Leia like that. It wasn’t fair of me."

"Don’t apologize… I get why you did it. She must have been close to you."

"I mean… kind of? Ben, I’m sure you know what her last words were. They’re absolutely true. She never stopped caring about you."

"I know. But it was always going to end this way. Luke, Han and Leia always had to die."

"It’s awful that they did, even if you say they had to. Don’t you have any regrets? Anything you wanted to say to them that you were never able to?"

"Do you know what happens to Force-sensitive people when they die?"

"What happens to them..?" asked Rey with a raised eyebrow, her confusion bringing her to stop in her tracks as she maintained her gaze at him; prompting Ben to stop as well, turning to face her. "They’re just… dead, right?"

"Those Jedi texts you stole didn’t have anything about that?" joked Ben. "Not people like us, no," he finished, before turning back up the narrow path between the trees.

"What are you saying, exactly?" Rey asked, walking swiftly to catch up to his side. "Leia and Luke aren’t dead?"

"Oh they are," answered Ben. deadpan. "They just don’t _leave_. They become one with the Force and, can show up anywhere they want. Haunt whoever they want."

"So they’re… ghosts?"

"That’s… a surprisingly apt term. I guess they are ghosts."

"And you’ve seen one? One of these ghosts?"

"Yeah."

"Luke?"

"…"

"You’ve seen him?"

"When I— when he, on Crait… you know what happened, right?"

"Yeah I figured out how he was able to do it."

"Well I didn’t know it wasn’t really him, and when he showed up to duel, before I thought I finished him off he said if I struck him down in anger he’d never leave me."

Rey suddenly burst out laughing, drawing a confused look from Ben.

"I’m sorry," she said, gathering herself. "It’s just, how did you not realize it wasn’t really him? What would Luke Skywalker have been doing on Crait?"

"How about we come back to this later. We’re here," declared Ben, as they came to the summit of the woodland hills.

Several hundred feet from where Rey and Ben Solo now found themselves— on a clearing atop the mountain— stood an impressively large stone building, big enough to be considered a fortress; its jagged walls and dilapidated architecture bleak and uninviting. The structure was surrounded by numerous stone pillars bearing strange, occult markings: it seemed to be the only manmade object for several hundred miles; completely isolated, and devoid of any signs of activity. It had started to rain once they arrived, and the ground beneath their feet quickly turned to mud as they walked towards the massive pillars that lined the site of the clearing.

"Just what is it you came to do here, Ben?" asked Rey, finally breaking the tense silence that scored their approach to the massive establishment.

"The very last remnants of the Sith in the galaxy are in that building," he answered calmly, igniting his saber. "We’re going to kill them."

"In for a penny…" she replied, igniting the saber in her left hand as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took so long for this chapter to come out, the post-holiday period grind was rough, real life stuff piled on up on me really fast. More regular updates to resume henceforth.
> 
> The positive response has been really encouraging as well, over 30 kudos! Never expected even half that when I posted that first chapter, it's not a concert but I'm glad at least even a handful of people could find satisfaction in this after the mess that was TROS. 
> 
> Onwards!


	13. Destinations

"What’s the point of a casino planet anyways?" asked Ameena through half-shut eyes; the stunning golden reflections of Cantonica clearly visible in her verdant irises as she peered through the windows of the heavy-class freighter that was now in orbital approach.

Wilsa said nothing at first, staring at Ameena with a bewildered expression from across their table, a small one that flanked the central hub of the main cabin. The two had sat there together since they left Navarro, passing the time by talking about whatever random thoughts popped in their heads. Rose had told them to stay alert in case of another ambush but the trip to the Corporate Sector had been as uneventful as most Resistance journeys had been.

Some crew members passed the time by playing card games or watching holos, but most used these opportunities for some hard-earned R&R in their rooms; there was a reason they traveled in freighters, after all— the extensive storage space made refurbishment straightforward, and housing was the least of their worries. A life constantly on the move wasn’t easy for them, especially because they had left behind stable lives to join the cause. It was hard, demanding work; asking much of everyone, but ultimately fulfilling in spite of the grind.

As such, the ship was mostly devoid of activity—the central hub least of all— by the time they exited hyperspace, jumping out right after the Millennium Falcon and right before the medical ship did in tow; making their way in formation towards the casino planet whose reason for existence Ameena had so bluntly questioned.

"The… point?" Wilsa finally replied.

"Yeah, like, why have a whole planet just for gambling? Why do rich people love being surrounded by other rich people?"

"I think the answer is in your question."

"Right. You ever been?"

" _Here_? Yeah. A Casino? No."

"Not the risk-taking type, are we?"

"Hardly. Being from royalty means lots of official visits and ceremonies… some of which take place in casinos."

"In casinos," she echoed, with a nonplussed expression.

"Not as if I was old enough to do anything anyways. But the sort of people who like places like that aren’t the sort of people I like."

"Can say that again."

* * *

The three ships landed on a beach about two miles south of Canto Bight. As usual, they began setting up camp and awaited further instructions. Jannah stood out on a cliff towards the edge of the encampment, facing the scenic bay the city overlooked. Rose and Finn walked up to join her, already reminiscing on the last time they were here.

"Feels like yesterday we let those fathiers lose," said Finn, his arm taut as he aimed his blaster into the cool night air at nothing in particular.

"Never actually thought we’d be back here, honestly. At least not so soon," Rose replied. "It’s strange. But these are strange times."

"Should we get going, then?" pondered Jannah, as if awaiting orders— she was not used to the free-flowing, amorphous manner in which the Resistance conducted business; it being a stark contrast from the rigid command structures of the First Order

"Take it from me," Finn began, "you wanna have a plan before you go running in there."

"And _we_ ," said Rose, "probably still have bounties on our heads here since we sort of broke out of jail, brought the city’s horseracing revenue down to zero and tore through town before escaping.""Right."

"So we need disguises."

"Yes, given the state of our clothing we’d stick out like a sore thumb," said Jannah, inspecting her makeshift armor.

"I believe we can be of assistance!" a fourth voice added, prompting the three leaders to turn around. None other than that of Wilsa Teshlo, with Ameena in tow. "I couldn’t help overhearing you say you needed a way into Canto Bight?"

"Actually we saw you guys walking here and hurried over because we assumed shenanigans were about to ensue," interrupted Ameena deadpan, prompting a glare from Wilsa before she continued.

"You have a way in?" Finn asked.

"My dad… owns a hotel there."

Their jaws dropped to the floor, until Finn broke the silence.

"Your dad, _owns_ a hotel on Canto Bight?"

"Yeah, the Sleeping Siren."

"What are you doing with the Resistance???" interjected Rose.

"It’s a long story, I’ll tell you on the way back."

"If we get back," quipped Ameena.

"Zip it," Wilsa snapped. "Do you need to get in or not?"

"The rest of these guys are good here, we’ll radio backup if it gets hot in there," said Finn. "We do need a way in."

"If your father owns the hotel," added Jannah, "they know you. What about the rest of us?"

"I’ll handle it, you guys just need disguises," Wilsa replied confidently. She exuded the impression of having given this plan a fair amount of thought.

"Disguises." Jannah echoed, to a growing grin from Wilsa.

"I don’t like it…" said Rose, "but it’s the best we got right now."

"Great," Wilsa declared. "If you’d follow me, we’ll be on our way."

And so they disappeared into the valley.

* * *

Rey and Ben Solo were tired. Leaning on each others’ backs, their faces flush with blood and sweat, their arms taut and aching with the weight of the still-ignited sabers in their firm grasp, they stood alone in the center of a murky chamber, surrounded by the lifeless cloaked bodies of the Sith cultists who, mere moments ago, ambushed them upon their arrival.

"Where did they come from?" Rey finally said, sheathing her red saber as she saw the coast clear, for now.

"Is that really the most pressing issue on your mind?" answered Ben, going deeper into the ruins they found themselves in.

"I suppose not," she replied, following him.

"What did you come to find here, exactly? It can’t just have been to kill all these people. They weren’t exactly harming anyone holed up in here."

"…"

"You didn’t come for some _thing_ , didn’t you. You came for some _one_."

"…"

"You’re looking for someone. You think they’re here."

"Rey."

"You came all this way—"

"REY."

"What?"

"He’s here."

"Who’s here?"

"Luke."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry again for the huge delay in between updates. Real life stuff caught up to me and STAYED caught up. Regular updates should resume.


	14. Reunions

"You," snarled Rey, not even stopping to consider how in the galaxy it was possible for Luke Skywalker to have appeared before them. Without thinking, she drew her saber and lunged for him, almost falling over when her vicious slash through his torso met no resistance; the whiff of what was surely a clean strike revealing the man before them to be no man at all, but a projection of the Force itself.

"Hey, watch where you swing that thing," Luke said wryly. 

"So force ghosts are real." said Rey.

"Real, is right. It’s also how much trouble we’re about to be in."

"Trouble?"

"Your friend Ben is about to do something colossally stupid, and I’m here to talk him out of it."

"Skywalker," Ben said coldly.

"Kid."

"This doesn’t concern you."

"Oh but it does," he said. "You realize what you’re trying to do affects more than just _this_ galaxy?"

"If you’re not here to tell me where to find it, you can leave."

"You realize—" Luke’s words were quickly interrupted by a flash of red, brandished by Rey once more and pointed eagerly at his intangible face.

"Not one word out of you," Rey sneered. She made no attempt to hide the fact that she neither respected Luke nor cared what he had to say about any of this. "Ben. Tell me what’s going on."

The Supreme Leader gave a defeated sigh, and stepped forward to Rey as he began explaining the situation.

"There’s no more Jedi left, thanks you and I; but there is still at least one Sith Lord remaining. If the force is to be balanced, they have to die. There’s no getting around it."

"One more Sith Lord?"

"That reductionist thinking will get you all killed, Ben," Luke said, before he was met with a glare from Rey. He continued, "You can’t just murder every Force user in the galaxy, that is crazy!"

"That doesn’t sound half bad to me," surmised Rey.

"Listen, this isn’t going to—"

"—go the way we think, yes, I’m sure it won’t," Rey snapped, still holding the saber to his face. "So all these people we’ve so dutifully murdered aren’t Sith Lords?"

"No," echoed both of them.

"But the Sith Lords are here?"

"I have it on good authority that at least one Sith Lord is here," Ben said.

"And what about Luke? You sounded like he knew he’d be here."

"He can appear wherever there is a connection with the Force. You and I are connected to the Force. So is he. It can’t be helped."

"…He just shows up," she repeated, in disbelief. "Well _I_ didn’t fly all the way here for nothing so if you two are done standing around, we can maybe get moving?"

Ben followed her, before Luke disappeared and reappeared before the pair, floating just behind them as they walked along the dark hallway, pleading a case for reconsideration that fell on deaf ears.

* * *

"Are you going to stop ignoring me?"

Rey heard Luke’s question, but gave it no response.

"Rey, you can’t keep this up. You can’t hold a grudge forever."

"Rey?" asked Ben, genuinely concerned.

"I don’t know what her deal is," Luke added.

"Holding a grudge would imply I cared about you," she snapped, stopping in her track to turn around and face him. "I don’t. I came to your stupid island because my friends told me you could help them, and all you did once I got there was complain, berate me, and lie to me about what happened to Ben. When I left that place I hoped I would never see you again. I don’t even know how to deal with the fact that you can just appear whenever you want and talk to me, like I even have anything to say to you."

"Rey…" Ben had to grab hold of her arm. "You’re shaking."

"Luke, if you came here expecting to offer us sage advice on our journey and what to do next, let me be the one to say this isn’t going to go the way you think."

"Listen," Luke answered, solemnly. "I understand you want nothing to do with me. But like it or not, this is bigger than you. If you both want to burn it all down, I can’t stop you. Literally can’t. But I can help you not get killed on the way. And avoid pissing off the wrong people."

"It seems you're ready to talk, Skywalker," said Ben. "What do you know of the Sith presence on this planet?"

"We got company up ahead. More Sith. You guys are getting closer to whatever these guys are guarding. Make it out of this and I’ll tell you what you need to know."

"Congratulations," Rey declared, igniting her saber. "That’s the first time today you’ve been right about something."

* * *

The Sleeping Siren is a majestic, seven-story villa overlooking the eastern part of the bight for which the casino city was named, its golden walls and extravagant architecture serving as an opulent backdrop for most of the city’s tourist attractions: the most affluent of whose visitors stayed in the hotel. Guests of the Sleeping Siren, invariably being of immense wealth, usually made their bookings well in advance; by making direct financial contributions to the hotel, they could in effect use it more as temporary lodging than a regular hotel room. The result of this system of benefaction was that there tended to be no standard hotel lobby, with a concierge, a front desk and clerks who you could ask to check you in— patrons simply walked in already having paid for their rooms, and already knowing where their rooms were.

So as Princess Wilsa Teshlo of Kessuria and Ameena of the Resistance made their way into the hotel dressed in stunning black and maroon evening gowns and full glam, it wasn’t just for show. They not only had to look like they belonged there, but also had to act like they had been there before: go straight to their room and not hesitate. So far, so good.

"This is stupid," Ameena complained. "This dress is stupid, this makeup is stupid, this hotel is stupid, I feel stupid."

"Relax honey, you look great," was the calm response from Wilsa.

"Do you even know where we’re going?"

"Of course not, that’s why you’re here. I need you to use that heat vision of yours to scope out these rooms and see which of them is empty."

"Maybe if you hadn’t doused my pits in 3 layers of foundation…"

"Oh hush. Now hurry, we can only catwalk around this lobby for so long pretending to be important before we get the wrong kinds of looks."

"Wouldn’t _that_ be a shame," Ameena quipped, before focusing on her surroundings; not so much looking as _feeling_ around the sea of warmth, until she settled on a dead zone not far from where they were. "There," she said, pointing to where she’d noticed the lack of heat. A room one level above them, whose door faced the lobby.

"Not bad, Ameena. Now hurry before someone sees us," said Wilsa, taking Ameena’s hand and hurrying towards the spiral stairs that faced the central art installation of the lobby area.

"You don’t expect me to sprint in these high heels, do you? Where did you even get these?"

"I know people."

As the pair made their way up the stairs, they spotted an unforeseen hiccup: a patrolling security guard. Given the status of this establishment’s clientele it was not unusual for there to be security present. However, they knew not to pester the more important patrons: for they knew that those patrons usually had a high chance of knowing someone within the hotel administration— someone whose desk a complaint regarding officer conduct were to fall on could easily spell the end of their livelihood with the snap of a finger. For Wilsa, her status as Princess of Kessuria meant she would be free from worry, but Ameena had no such luxury: and she would be powerless to seek retribution because doing so would require her to disclose the circumstances of her arrival on Canto Bight.

It wouldn’t have to come to that. As the guard made his way around the wall that flanked the stairwell, Wilsa acted on impulse:

"Kiss me," she blurted out.

"What?" recoiled Ameena.

But before she could protest further, Wilsa dove in eyes closed: locking lips with the svelte Yrkan she now embraced, leaning against the wall in plain sight, making sure that any prying eyes would be forced to awkwardly avert their gaze and promptly remove themselves from the vicinity— as one tended to do upon encountering a public display of affection such as this. The gambit proved successful. The guard, upon reaching the steps hurriedly made his way down, making sure not to be caught staring at what was doubtless a sight for sore eyes. The two Resistance fighters looked at home in this environment, their bodies flush against the flawless marble walls of the hotel interior, the conjoined silhouettes of their dark-colored dresses striking a vivid contrast against the golden trim of the spiral railings. They pulled away from each other mere seconds after the coast was clear, but it felt like an eternity.

Just as quickly as they’d stopped in their tracks, they rushed up the stairs and around the corner to the door of the empty room, waiting with bated breath for a few seconds before locking it from the inside and bursting into laughter at the fact that this hare-brained scheme had actually worked.

"Of course a place like this wouldn’t lock their room doors," said Ameena.

"Who would ever try to break in?" Wilsa answered, giggling.

"So what now?"

"Now, we just have to get a former death trooper and two wanted fugitives in here."

"Of course," deadpanned Ameena. "This was the easy part."


End file.
